Human-in-the-Loop for AI HR Onboarding Agents

Before an onboarding agent creates accounts or grants access for a new hire, human-in-the-loop review catches the wrong start date, wrong team, or wrong system.

Where onboarding agents overreach

An onboarding agent is usually right — it reads the HRIS record, matches the role to a template, and drafts the right set of actions. The problem is what happens on the days it's wrong: a start date pulled from a stale record, a contractor mapped to the full-time template, a role matched to the wrong department's access list. None of those show up as an error. The agent just confidently provisions the wrong thing, and by the time anyone notices, a contractor has prod access or a new hire got added to a channel two teams over.

HR data also has a compliance angle most agent actions don't: account creation and access grants for a real person are the kind of change an auditor will ask about later. A human approval step means that trail exists by construction, not by someone remembering to write it down.

Gating the provisioning actions

The drafting stays agentic. Only the three actions in the right-hand column above go through Impri. Using the TypeScript SDK's requiresApproval wrapper keeps the approval logic out of the provisioning functions themselves:

import { ImpriClient, ImpriRejected } from '@impri/sdk'

const client = new ImpriClient({ apiKey: process.env.IMPRI_API_KEY! })

async function createSsoAccount(employee: { name: string; email: string; role: string }) {
  await sso.createUser({ email: employee.email, displayName: employee.name, role: employee.role })
}

const gatedCreateSsoAccount = client.requiresApproval(createSsoAccount, {
  kind: 'hr.account_provision',
  title: (employee) => `Create SSO account: ${employee.name} (${employee.role})`,
  preview: (employee) => ({
    format: 'markdown' as const,
    body: `**Name:** ${employee.name}\n**Email:** ${employee.email}\n**Role:** ${employee.role}\n\nStart date confirmed in HRIS. Approving creates the SSO account and assigns the ${employee.role} access template.`,
  }),
  expiresIn: 172800, // 48h — most onboarding runs a day or two ahead of start date
})

try {
  await gatedCreateSsoAccount({ name: 'Jordan Lee', email: '[email protected]', role: 'backend-engineer' })
} catch (err) {
  if (err instanceof ImpriRejected) {
    console.log('HR rejected — likely a data mismatch, check the HRIS record before retrying.')
  } else {
    throw err
  }
}

The Slack invite and welcome email get their own requiresApproval-wrapped functions with their own kind (hr.channel_invite, hr.welcome_email) rather than being bundled into one giant approval — a reviewer who's fine with the SSO account but unsure about a channel invite (say, it's a channel with a client on it) can approve one and reject the other independently.

What the HR reviewer sees

Each card shows the employee's name, role, and the specific system being touched — not a generic "onboarding task pending" notification that requires opening a dashboard to understand. Because these actions don't set editable, the reviewer can't silently rewrite the role or email inline; if something's wrong, rejecting and fixing the source HRIS record is the correct path, not editing around it. That also means decision.finalPreview will always match the original preview for these actions — there's no human-edited draft to reconcile before provisioning.

Handling rejection and expiry

A rejected onboarding action almost always means bad source data, not a bad automation. Route the rejection back to whoever owns the HRIS record rather than silently retrying — retrying an SSO account creation against the same stale data just produces the same rejection. Treat expired the same way: a 48-hour-old unreviewed provisioning request usually means the request queue itself needs a nudge, covered in more depth in the core integration guide.

Next step

If your onboarding agent runs as an MCP tool inside an internal ops assistant rather than a standalone script, see the MCP integration for the equivalent three-call flow without writing HTTP or SDK code directly. For notifying HR over Slack instead of the web inbox, see Slack approval.