How do I trigger onboarding from a TempWorks hire status?

Last updated: October 9, 2026

Onboarded can create a placement — and run the policy engine — the moment an employee's hire status changes in TempWorks. A hire-status placement knows the employee and the employer, but not a job order or customer, so it's the right trigger for general onboarding and the wrong one for client- or job-specific paperwork.

Steps

There are two halves to this. First you turn the trigger on in the TempWorks configuration, then you point a policy — the rules that decide which forms an employee gets — at the placement it produces. You'll need:

A TempWorks integration with saved credentials. The Configuration step stays locked until credentials are in.
The hire statuses your recruiters actually use in TempWorks — you'll pick from that list.

Turn on the trigger

Go to Marketplace in the left nav.
Find the TempWorks card and select Edit. You should see the Configure TempWorks panel open on its Credentials step.
Select Configuration at the top of the panel.
Scroll to Placement creation triggers — "Choose when placements are created and the policy engine runs." The first two toggles, On assignment created and On employee job board registration, are always on and can't be changed.
Turn on On employee's hire status change. A status picker appears reading Select statuses....
Select each hire status that should start onboarding — for example, File Pending. Onboarded saves the moment you pick one, and you should see the confirmation "Placement status triggers saved."

Flipping the toggle on by itself saves nothing. What gets stored is the list of statuses, and the toggle reads its state back from that list — turn it on, close the panel without picking a status, and it reads off again next time. Turning the toggle off clears every status you'd selected.

The picker lists the active hire statuses on your TempWorks account. Onboarded holds onto that list for a day at a time, so a new status you add in TempWorks can take up to 24 hours to show up here.

Point a policy at the placement

Each placement this trigger creates is named after the status that fired it, in the form Hire Status (File Pending). That name is what a policy rule matches on.

Open the policy that should assign the onboarding packet.
Add a condition on placement.name.
Use is against the full value including the parentheses — Hire Status (File Pending) — or contains Hire Status to catch every hire status you selected.
Save the policy.

What a hire-status placement can match on

The hire-status event from TempWorks identifies the employee and their new status — nothing else. Onboarded pulls the full employee record, resolves the employer from the employee's TempWorks branch, and creates a placement linked to those two. There's no job order and no customer on it.

Client and job conditions never match on a hire-status placement.

client.name, job.name, job.address.state, and job.custom_attributes.* have no value here, so client.name is Acme Logistics comes back false. Negative operators flip the other way — client.name is not Acme Logistics comes back true for every hire-status placement. Client- or job-specific paperwork has to wait for a placement that knows the job: an Assignment placement, or a Candidate Status (…) placement from 📄 How do I trigger onboarding from a TempWorks candidate status?

What you can match on:

placement.name — which hire status fired the trigger.
employer.name and employer.custom_attributes.* — the employer tied to the employee's branch.
employee.address.state, employee.custom_attributes.*, and the rest of the employee fields in 📄 Facts available by default — whatever TempWorks holds on the employee record.

Example

Take an account whose employees land in TempWorks from a job board feed, well before anyone puts them on a job order. The account turns on the hire-status trigger for File Pending and builds two policies:

A general onboarding policy with placement.name is Hire Status (File Pending). It assigns the paperwork every employee needs wherever they end up working.
A client-specific policy with client.name is Acme Logistics. It assigns that customer's site safety acknowledgment.

The employee gets their general packet as soon as they're File Pending. The safety packet arrives later, on the Assignment placement — the point where Onboarded actually knows they're working for Acme Logistics.

Verify

Change an employee's hire status in TempWorks to one you selected. Shortly after, you should see a new placement on that employee named Hire Status (<status>), carrying the tasks your policy assigns.

If nothing appears, work through these in order:

Reopen the Configuration step and confirm your statuses are still listed. A toggle switched on with nothing selected doesn't persist, and it's the most common cause.
Confirm the policy rule matches the stored value. is against Hire Status never fires — the status is always in parentheses — and text matching is case-sensitive by default.
Confirm the policy doesn't also require a client.* or job.* condition. Those never match on this placement.
Confirm the status you changed in TempWorks is one you picked. A status you didn't select is ignored without an error.
The placement is created only when the employee syncs and the employer resolves from their branch. If either fails, no placement appears — check the sync for errors on that employee in 📄 How do I monitor a TempWorks sync?

If the placement reads Hire Status (null), TempWorks sent the status change without a status name. The placement is still valid and your policies still run, but an is rule written against the status name won't match it. contains Hire Status will.

Each status you select creates its own placement. If an employee moves from File Pending to Active and you've selected both, that's two placements and two policy evaluations. It's one placement per employee per status, though — an employee who leaves a status and later returns to it keeps the original placement, and the policy doesn't run again.