Understanding placement status

Last updated: May 27, 2026

Placement status is a single value — completed or incompleted — that Onboarded computes from a placement's progress. It's the standard signal to fire an automation at the moment an employee finishes onboarding.

What it is

Every placement has a status of either completed or incompleted. Onboarded derives this from the placement's progress — the fraction of required tasks that have reached completed. If progress is exactly 1.0 (every required task done), the status is completed. Anything less, it's incompleted.

Status isn't something you set. It moves when task completion moves.

If you remember nothing else: placement.status is completed exactly when placement.progress equals 1.0.

Why it matters

Status is a fact and a trigger inside the Automations builder, where it's the standard way to fire something off the moment a new hire finishes their onboarding.

If you've ever wanted to send a welcome email when an employee is done, create a follow-up task for the hiring manager once onboarding wraps, or kick off a downstream workflow at the moment of completion — status is the signal.

How it works

The two values

There are exactly two: completed and incompleted. There's no in_progress, no not_started, no blocked. The model is intentionally binary — either every required task is done, or it isn't.

A new placement starts at incompleted. It stays there as the employee works through their tasks. The instant the last required task flips to completed, the placement's status flips to completed.

Expired tasks are excluded from the progress calculation entirely, so they don't hold a placement back.

As facts in Automations

Inside the Automations builder, two paths are exposed on placement-triggered automations:

placement.status — the value, either completed or incompleted.
placement.progress — the underlying fraction, from 0.0 to 1.0.

You'll mostly use placement.status. Reach for placement.progress only when you need a partial-progress condition — for example, fire when a placement is at least halfway done. That's uncommon.

Triggering an automation off status

When you create the automation:

Set Entity Type to Placement.
Add Status to the watched dependencies.

The automation now evaluates whenever a placement's status changes. In practice, that's the moment its last required task is completed and progress hits 1.0.

If you also enable Run on creation, the automation evaluates at the moment the placement is created. New placements almost always start at incompleted, so add a condition like placement.status is completed if you only want the post-completion path.

When status doesn't reach `completed`

A placement only reaches completed when every required task is completed. If a required task can't get there — a failed background check, an unresolved E-Verify case, an IDV check that returns a deny — the placement's status stays at incompleted, even though no further work is realistically going to happen.

If your account uses tasks that can fail or stall (background checks, IDV, E-Verify), don't assume an automation watching placement.status = completed will fire for every employee. Some placements will sit at incompleted indefinitely. Use a separate signal — a manual review step or a task-level outcome field — for those paths.

Example

Take an account that wants the hiring manager to get an email the moment a new employee finishes onboarding.

The HR Engineer opens the Automations builder and creates a new automation. They set Entity Type to Placement and add Status as a watched dependency.

In the automation graph, the first node after the trigger is a condition: placement.status is completed. The action node is a Send email, addressed to the manager's email stored at client.custom_attributes.hiring_manager_email. The subject reads {employee first_name} {employee last_name} finished onboarding, and the body confirms the role, start date, and a link back to the placement record in Onboarded.

The next time an employee at that account completes their last required task, the placement's progress hits 1.0, status flips to completed, the automation evaluates, and the hiring manager's inbox gets a message — within seconds of the final task closing.