Move what the employment record needs: legal name and contact details, the role and its level, reporting manager, start date, work location, employment type, agreed compensation and the documents collected during onboarding. Leave the hiring evidence behind, including interview notes, scorecards, rejection reasons and every other candidate. Agree who owns the record once the handover fires.
The moment a candidate becomes an employee, the record crosses a boundary between two systems with different purposes, different audiences and different retention rules. An [applicant tracking system](/ats) is the source of truth for everything before that boundary - the pipeline, the assessment, the offer - and the HR system is the source of truth for everything after. Treating the crossing as a contract, with a named field list and a named owner on each side, is what stops the two teams making different assumptions. Without it you get the familiar failure: recruitment believes the details went across, HR believes recruitment will send them, and the new joiner spends their first week retyping information they already provided twice. Write the field list down and review it when either system changes.
Identity first: legal name as it appears on official documents, date of birth, personal contact number and email, and the identity references your statutory records require. Then the employment terms: designation, grade or level, department, reporting manager, work location and legal entity, employment type, start date, probation period if any, and notice terms. Then compensation exactly as agreed in the offer, including its structure rather than only the headline figure. Then the onboarding collateral: signed offer and acceptance, background verification outcome as a status, and the documents collected during pre-joining. Finally the source information that recruitment analytics later depends on - channel, referrer if applicable, requisition reference - because once the record moves it becomes very hard to reattach. Everything on this list has an operational use after joining, which is the test for inclusion.
Interview notes, interviewer scorecards, ratings, rejection reasons for the other applicants, salary expectations stated during screening, and internal debrief comments. These exist to support a hiring decision and they serve no purpose in an employment record, where they can be read by managers who were never part of the process and used in contexts they were never written for. Do not move the other candidates at all; they never became employees and their data belongs under the recruitment retention schedule. Also leave behind resumes as free-form documents where you can, since a resume is a claim rather than a verified record and the verified version now lives in the employee file. The general rule is simple: if a field would be uncomfortable to justify to the employee long after joining, it does not cross.
One system must win, immediately and unambiguously. After the handover, changes to name, contact details, manager, designation and compensation happen in the [HR system](/hrms) and nowhere else, and the recruitment record becomes historical. State this in the contract and enforce it technically if you can, because a record that remains editable in both places will diverge, usually within the first month when the start date moves. Handle the joining-date change explicitly, since it is the most common post-offer amendment and it touches payroll, onboarding tasks, access provisioning and the recruiter's own reporting. Decide who is responsible for propagating it, in which direction, and by when. Agree also what recruitment keeps for its own metrics, so closing the requisition does not depend on reading a system the recruiter no longer has access to.
Duplicates arrive from three routes and each needs its own rule. A rehire already has an employee record, so the matching key has to be checked before creation rather than after, and the decision about reactivating versus creating a new record should be written down along with what happens to service continuity. A contractor converting to permanent often exists in the system already under a different employment type. And an internal mover who applied through the careers site can enter the pipeline as a fresh candidate entirely. Pick a matching key that actually works - an identity reference is more reliable than a name and date of birth, and personal email is better than nothing - and run the check at handover, not at month end when the duplicate has already been paid.
Two moments compete and each has consequences. Firing on offer acceptance gives pre-joining time to work: onboarding tasks can be assigned, documents collected, equipment ordered and access requested before day one, which is the difference between a first day that works and one spent waiting. The cost is that the HR system now holds records for people who have not joined and some of whom will not, so those records need a distinct status that keeps them out of headcount, payroll and every report until they convert. Firing on day one keeps the data clean and makes pre-joining impossible. Most organisations choose acceptance and manage the status carefully; whichever you pick, define what happens to a record when someone declines late or does not turn up, and make sure your [onboarding process](/employee-onboarding-software) reads the same status.
The failures are predictable and expensive. A missing or mistyped identity reference stops a statutory registration and surfaces at the first payroll run rather than at handover. A compensation structure transferred as a single figure produces a first payslip the employee disputes on day thirty. A wrong start date miscalculates leave accrual, probation dates and the first salary proration simultaneously. A missing manager means approval routing fails silently and the joiner cannot apply for anything. And a duplicate record means someone appears twice in headcount and possibly in the bank file. All of these are caught by a reconciliation between the two systems for every joiner in the first cycle - a short check comparing the field list on both sides - which is far cheaper than discovering them individually in month two.
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