Starting point
The company, around 400 employees, production and administration at one site, had two things that rarely come together: an IT department that runs its own servers, and a management that had ruled out cloud AI for personnel data. ChatGPT was blocked, Copilot had not been approved after a review by the data protection officer. That was not backwardness, it was a decision. It just meant the four-person HR team had no tool that was allowed to work under those rules.
Onboarding went like this: the contract came back signed, HR emailed IT, IT asked for the start date, the manager found out on Friday that someone starts on Monday. The welcome email went out when somebody remembered. The moment it tipped was a Monday in spring: a new colleague sat in a meeting room for two hours on her first day without a laptop, because the start date in the email to IT was wrong. The head of HR had three such chains open that day and called me the following week.
At the first meeting the head of HR, the head of IT and the works council chair sat at the table. The head of IT said he was happy to run another internal system if HR owned it professionally. The works council chair said she wanted to see every automation before it runs, because a workflow that logs actions is a technical system in the sense of co-determination. Both were exactly the foundation the project was built on.
Approach
Week one belonged to the stopwatch, as always. Every person in the team noted which task came how often and how many people it involved. Three processes ended up at the top: onboarding with its seven participants, the reference-letter request that started with a hallway conversation, and the acknowledgement for applications, written by whoever had time. None of the three needed a decision in the first step; all three consisted of forwarding, reminding and filing.
In week two I set up n8n on a dedicated server together with the head of IT, with backup, access only for HR and IT, and a retention period for execution logs specified by the data protection officer. The same day the works council chair sat in the build room. We started the onboarding workflow not on screen but on paper: what triggers it, which five data fields it needs, who receives which message, where a human decides. Only when that sketch had been signed off by HR, IT and the works council was it rebuilt in n8n.
The finished workflow is simple, and that is deliberate. The signed contract is filed in the HR folder, that is the trigger. n8n reads name, start date, department, manager and location from the personnel record, nothing more; the contract itself is not passed on. From that come the IT ticket with the start date, an appointment for the first conversation in the manager's calendar, a task list for day one and, three days before the start, the welcome email. Before the welcome email there is an approval step: HR sees the draft and sends it, or holds it. The works council chair insisted on that step, and it has paid off twice since, when a start date was moved at short notice.
The snag came with the reference-letter request. The first version sent the manager a form with free text fields, and the answers were as thin as the three sentences in the hallway. We rebuilt the form with the works council: fixed fields for duties, responsibility, two or three results and conduct in the team, plus a note that the reference will only be as good as the bullet points. Since then n8n creates a task in HR from the form, with all bullet points, and HR writes the reference from it without asking back. A language model was deliberately not used in this project, because management had ruled it out for personnel data; connecting a model run in-house would be technically possible and is on the list for the review.
The works agreement ran in parallel. Because every workflow logs actions, it was clear that it is subject to co-determination. The text grew out of the signed-off sketches: which three workflows run, which fields they read, who may see the logs, when they are deleted, and that every new workflow is shown to the works council first. The works council met every three weeks, the data protection officer wanted to check the access rights on the server himself. After three months the agreement was signed, the three workflows ran in production, and the HR team maintained them with IT without me.
Outcome
Onboarding now starts with filing the contract and ends with a welcome email that HR has approved. IT gets its ticket on the day of signature, the manager gets the appointment, nobody writes an email chain any more. The reference-letter request arrives as a form with bullet points that are enough for a letter. Applicants receive their acknowledgement the same day, from a template the works council has read.
Personnel data did not leave the building at any step; that was the condition, and it held. The works agreement names the three workflows, the fields read, the retention of logs and the procedure for new workflows. At the six-month review the team presented a fourth workflow, the reminder for the probation review, built with IT on its own. That it needed nobody from outside for that was the goal.