Is Jira Really Only Suitable for IT Teams?
Not at all. In modern business, HR professionals handle dozens of processes: onboarding, offboarding, training, requests, surveys, analytics. All these processes are ideal candidates for management in Jira. Especially considering that recruitment, onboarding, and training are closely connected with the work of team leads, mentors, and operations teams. That’s why Jira is well-suited for organizing HR processes, task management, and cross-functional collaboration between departments.
Thanks to its flexibility and extensive functionality, Jira can be transformed into a convenient HR tool.
In this article, we’ll show you how to do this – from the simplest onboarding scenario to full automation, team training, and creating your own no-code solution. We’ll share only practical cases that have already helped HR teams genuinely improve their processes.
Jira’s Potential for HR Processes
Traditionally, HR tasks are scattered across different tools: Excel, Google Forms, email, task managers, and endless chats. But as the team grows, the number of applications, tasks, and requests increases, and sooner or later, manual administration becomes more of a hindrance than a help.
That’s when the need arises for a unified system that will collect all requests and tasks in one place, clearly distribute responsibilities, and establish a sequence of actions. Jira helps bring order to HR processes, replacing disparate tools with an intuitive dashboard where it’s easy to track statuses, deadlines, and team workload.
Gradually, in such a system, you can build typical scenarios and repetitive processes that are often performed manually. One of the first is onboarding new employees. Let’s start with that.
1. Simple Start: Onboarding and Offboarding
Onboarding is one of the most typical HR processes that repeats every time a new person joins the company. In Jira, it’s easy to structure: create a task template (Epic) with subtasks for all process stages.
For example:
- set up access rights;
- send welcome letter;
- add to team chats;
- assign a mentor;
- provide access to internal resources;
- organize team meetings, etc.
Offboarding works similarly but with a different sequence of actions: revoking access, transferring tasks, summarizing results, gathering feedback.
Such templates help avoid mistakes, eliminate the need to keep everything in mind, and prevent missing important steps, as each process can have an assigned responsible person and set deadlines.
To make the process even more convenient, internal guides, policies, or checklists from Confluence can be added to Jira tasks as links. This ensures easy access to necessary materials during onboarding.
Additionally, with PeopleForce integration, Jira can automatically pull some data, such as new employee information or start date.
2. Next Step: Employee Request Automation
Team requests are another daily part of an HR professional’s work. Vacations, sick leaves, remote work, working abroad, certificates, etc. Each request requires processing, approval, and recording.
In Jira, you can create separate task types for the most common scenarios.
For example:
- “Vacation Request”;
- “Business Trip”;
- “Certificate Request”.
You can add a checklist or fields for entering necessary information in the task, such as date, vacation type, country, or comments. After that, the request goes through approval with the responsible manager, HR, and finance department – depending on the settings and workflow of the specific company.
The process can be significantly improved through automation. Instead of manual control, you can set up automatic actions that simplify HR work and reduce request processing time.
For example, automation can include:
- changing task status after approval to the appropriate stage,
- sending notifications to responsible persons in Slack or email,
- recording data in the corresponding database for further analysis and reporting.
This is just a basic example of an automated scenario that helps not only speed up work but also make it transparent for both HR and the employee.
3. Deeper Engagement: Performance Review and Feedback
Performance evaluation, regular one-on-one meetings, collecting feedback – these are all important but often informal processes that require consistency and attention to detail. Jira helps transform them into clear scenarios with checkpoints.
For performance reviews, you can create a task template with fields for goals, manager checklist, deadlines, and feedback options. Thanks to this approach, the HR team can maintain clear control over the process: who is being evaluated, when it happens, what stage the review is at, and who has left feedback.
Such tasks can be planned on a regular basis: quarterly, semi-annually, or in a continuous feedback format. Additionally, you can create a separate task type for collecting peer feedback – with fields that align with company policy.
This approach allows not only better recording of evaluation results but also generating unified analytics available as reports or dashboards directly in Jira.
4. Visibility and Analytics: Reports, Statuses, Dashboards
Even the best process loses effectiveness if you can’t track its results. Sounds familiar?
This is especially important in HR work: you need to see how many requests have been processed, what stage newcomers’ onboarding is at, who is delaying approvals, or when the last performance review was conducted.
That’s why Jira integrates these answers directly into the workflow rather than leaving them as separate tasks. Convenient and intuitive dashboards allow you to view key metrics in one place, including the number of active requests, task statuses, workload distribution, delays, etc.
To make analytics maximally useful, reports can be customized for your specific tasks:
- how many requests were created/closed per month;
- who approves tasks with delays;
- how long adaptation takes;
- how many people missed review deadlines, etc.
These dashboards help HR professionals and relevant managers get a complete and up-to-date picture of processes in real-time, without the need to send extra requests, search for information in files, or review long correspondence.
5. HR Process Automation in Jira: What It Is and How It Works
Automation is the setup of system actions that are performed independently without human intervention. This helps reduce routine work and avoid mistakes.
In the HR context, this can include:
- automatic creation of tasks and subtasks according to a specific scenario (e.g., onboarding and offboarding);
- changing task statuses after approvals or step completion;
- sending notifications to responsible persons through corporate messengers or email;
- collecting and recording data in systems for further analysis.
In Jira, there are several ways to implement automation: through built-in settings, custom scripts, or plugins from Atlassian Marketplace.
Source: Jira Marketplace
How it Works in Practice
For automating most HR processes in Jira, the QS Integration team developed the FlowX plugin. This is a no-code tool that allows HR teams to easily configure and launch complex processes without the need to write code or involve developers.
In other words, all those processes we described above can be set up once, and then they will work automatically for each new candidate or employee.
Main advantages of FlowX:
- simple configuration of complex scenarios without programming;
- HR team autonomy in process management;
- reduction of manual work and human errors;
- complete transparency of statuses and deadlines;
- ability to quickly adapt processes to new business needs.
HR teams already working in Jira note that thanks to FlowX, they have significantly reduced the number of errors in processes. Additionally, they became faster at responding to changes, and the need for technical support for updates has practically disappeared.
“There were 9 tables where we had to enter data about newcomers. We had to keep the whole process in mind, know who was responsible for what, and who replaces whom. Now everything is automated in Jira and everything is already thought out for you.”
Anastasia Reznichenko, HR Manager at QuartSoft
If you want to learn more about HR process automation capabilities, FlowX can become a useful tool for your team.
Summary: Jira’s Potential for HR Teams
Jira is a powerful platform that supports HR teams in organizing work, makes processes transparent and understandable, and makes communication more effective. It structures various HR tasks, from onboarding to feedback collection, and makes these processes more manageable.
One of Jira’s key advantages is the ability to automate routine tasks, which frees up time for strategic work and helps avoid mistakes. Using automation tools like FlowX, HR teams gain additional flexibility and control, adapting processes to specific needs.
If you want to learn how to most effectively use Jira for automating HR processes in your team, we’re always ready to support you.
