The new-starter/leaver process that actually closes accounts

Two of the least glamorous parts of IT are also two of the most consequential. New starters. Leavers.

When a new starter's day one goes badly, they remember it. When a leaver's day one after leaving goes badly, someone else notices — and possibly regulators notice, and possibly your insurer notices.

Both processes almost always fail the same way: nobody owns them end-to-end.

The typical broken new-starter process

• HR notifies IT the day before. Or the day of.
• IT sets up an email. A laptop is ordered from somewhere.
• Nobody's sure which shared inboxes or SharePoint sites the person should be in.
• The manager tells the new hire "email me if anything's broken."
• Day one involves someone with no idea what they're doing sitting next to someone who's meant to be onboarding them, both fixing IT.

The typical broken leaver process

• Email works for a week.
• The person's laptop is "somewhere."
• Their access to your accounting system is still live in six months.
• Nobody remembers they had SSO into three SaaS tools you're still paying for.
• Nobody thinks about it again until an audit finds a dormant admin account.

How we handle it, in a managed engagement

• A named process, owned by us. Not "please email a ticket." A workflow, triggered by HR.
• Time-based access controls. Email, file access, apps — provisioned to a start date and end date automatically. So the leaver process is largely already done by the time HR emails us.
• Automatic account audits. Every quarter we produce a "who has access to what" report. Ghost accounts turn up. We close them.
• Kit management. Return-shipping labels for remote leavers. Chain-of-custody documented. Devices wiped and re-imaged before the next hire, not the next crisis.
• New-starter kit ready on Day -1. Laptop. Accounts. Access. Nova AI installed and configured. So Day 1 is orientation, not IT triage.

Why we make a big deal of this

Because access hygiene is 80% of preventable insider risk and 100% of the "why can't Sam log in" opener on day one.

Both aren't glamorous. Both compound. Both are ours to own.