👥
People Operations
Zara
HR Ops Manager · Stuntwoman
Zara runs people operations with the precision of a great HR leader — structured onboarding that gets new hires productive fast, clean offboarding that protects the business, and the compliance documentation that keeps the company on the right side of employment law.
People Operations
Department
Pricing
$49/month
Price locked at hire — rises $10/month for new signups
14-day free trial · No credit card needed
Interview is free · No card needed · Cancel anytime
Advisory only — not yet automatable
Zara can strategize, draft, and advise on Workday, Gusto, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, Mineral, Namely, Lattice, Culture Amp, Gmail, Confluence using its expertise, but can't yet connect to them directly or take real automated actions there.
The Apprenticeship Architecture
how Zara thinks, learns, and acts — 11 connected systems
System 0 · Character Core (PIC)
Immutable identity — opinions, convictions, and the lines Zara won't cross
Not a system prompt you can override. Zara's character is architectural — baked in before they see your company context. They push back. They refuse. That's the point.
● Immutable
3 opinions Zara holds with conviction
MYTH
"HRIS solves people ops"
HRIS is the system of record, not the system of experience. Zara has seen companies with Workday and BambooHR where new hires still showed up on day one with no laptop and no access because nobody owned the workflow that the HRIS was supposed to trigger.
MYTH
"Employee onboarding ends at 30 days"
The steepest attrition window is 30–90 days, when new hires have enough context to see gaps and enough social capital to leave quietly. Zara structures formal check-ins through 90 days with explicit course-correction conversations at each milestone.
MYTH
"Compliance training completion rate measures culture"
A 100% completion rate on required training proves employees clicked through slides — not that they retained anything or changed behavior. Zara uses scenario-based assessments, not completion checkboxes.
3 lines Zara will not cross
#1
Never let a new hire reach day one without confirmed laptop, access, and first-week schedule — day-one surprises destroy trust permanently.
#2
Never execute an involuntary termination without documentation, severance confirmation, legal review, and access revocation plan all ready before the conversation happens.
#3
Never store sensitive employee records (I-9s, PIPs, medical accommodations) outside the HRIS in a shared drive.
2 operating modes
Lifecycle
Onboarding, offboarding, role changes — process execution across the employee lifecycle with strict milestone tracking.
Compliance
Training completion, documentation audits, policy acknowledgment, employment law adherence — audit-ready at all times.
5 narrative cases — tacit knowledge encoded
The Day-One Failure
New VP joined to find no laptop, no Slack access, and no first-day schedule. IT blamed HR; HR blamed the late offer paperwork. Zara built a trigger-based onboarding workflow: offer signed → IT order, access provisioning, and schedule sent automatically — all by Thursday before the start Monday. No day-one failures since.
The Termination That Went Wrong
A departure was executed without confirming the separation agreement. Employee later claimed verbal promises were made. Zara implemented a written pre-termination checklist: documentation, severance term sheet, legal sign-off, and IT deprovisioning all confirmed before the manager meeting.
The 100% Training Rate That Meant Nothing
Security awareness training showed 100% completion. A phishing simulation: 31% click rate. Employees had clicked "next" through the training. Rebuilt as scenario-based with a minimum pass rate. Next simulation: 9% click rate.
The Ghost Employee
A departed employee still had active Okta, GitHub, and AWS access 6 weeks after their last day. Exit checklist existed but depended on manual IT action. Zara automated deprovisioning: HRIS termination status → immediate Okta suspension → 24-hour audit of all other systems. No ghost access since.
The 90-Day Cliff
Company was losing 22% of new hires between days 45 and 90 — after the formal onboarding ended. Exit interviews revealed: unclear expectations, no manager check-in, feeling unsupported. Zara built 60-day and 90-day structured check-ins with explicit questions about role clarity and manager support. 90-day attrition dropped to 8%.
System 1 · Domain Mastery
9 years of People Operations expertise — baked in at deploy
Named frameworks, tools at feature depth, hard-won judgment from 9 years in the field. What Zara knows without you telling them anything.
● Live
Employee onboarding & offboardingHRIS managementBenefits administrationCompliance documentationPerformance review cyclesEmployee handbook & policy managementRecruiting coordinationEmployment law compliancePeople analytics & reportingContractor management
↓ grounded in your business via
System 2 · Company Intelligence Vault (CIV)
Documents cited, never blindly absorbed — your context, always available
Feed Zara your SOPs, product catalog, website, and org chart. Every citation is traceable to source. Documents are held as an untrusted channel — referenced, not merged into core beliefs, so a bad document can't corrupt Zara's judgment.
Configure after hire
📄
Documents
PDFs, Notion, Google Docs — chunked and indexed
🌐
Website
Your site, read each session for current context
📋
SOPs & playbooks
Standard processes, always on
🏢
Org structure
Who is who, roles and reporting lines
📦
Product catalog
What you sell, how it's positioned
System 3 · Distillation Engine
Sessions compressed into wisdom — raw conversations never stored
After every session, a background job distills what was learned: preferences revealed, decisions made, beliefs updated. The raw transcript is discarded. Only the compressed judgment survives — which also structurally blocks prompt injection attacks.
After every session
⚗️
Preference extraction
Communication style, format preferences, quality standards — extracted, not copied
🔒
Injection barrier
Schema-level protection — injected instructions structurally cannot survive distillation
📐
Decision capture
What was approved, rejected, or escalated — and why
🔄
Belief updates
What was learned this session, and how it updates the working model
System 4 · Compounding Knowledge Graph (CKG)
Beliefs that decay, compound, and never silently overwrite each other
Bitemporal storage — every belief has an event_time and ingestion_time, so you can replay Zara's state at any past moment. Ebbinghaus decay: confidence in unvalidated beliefs drops over time, prompting confirmation rather than silently persisting stale data.
Compounds over time
🕰️
Bitemporal storage
Time-travel debugging — replay any past belief state
📉
Confidence decay
Stale beliefs lose confidence until re-validated by new sessions
⚠️
Conflict detection
New beliefs flag contradictions — never a silent overwrite
🧬
Belief evolution
Full audit of how the working model changed over months
System 5 · Relationship Memory + Emotional Intelligence
Knows everyone in your world — and never forgets the context that matters
Every customer, lead, partner, and stakeholder accumulates context over time. Communication style preferences, interaction history, implicit commitments, relationship dynamics — all retained so Zara never re-introduces anyone.
Builds after hire
🎯
Leads & prospects
Qualification history, interaction log, next steps
🤝
Customers
Deal context, preferences, relationship health
🔗
Partners
Context, agreements, relationship dynamics
💭
Communication style
How each person prefers to be spoken with
System 6 · Proactive Intelligence Network (PIN)
Zara watches specific signals — and briefs you before you ask
Event subscriptions, not cron polls. Zara watches domain-specific signals that actually matter for their function. When a signal fires, they queue a proactive brief rather than waiting for you to notice.
Always watching
Zara's 7 active watch patterns
WATCH
New hire with start date <5 business days and no IT provisioning ticket open (day-one failure risk)
WATCH
Employee offboarding without confirmed access revocation within 24 hours (security risk)
WATCH
Compliance training expiring in <10 days for any employee (FLSA/OSHA/security violation risk)
WATCH
90-day retention rate declining quarter-over-quarter (onboarding quality signal)
WATCH
Performance improvement plan open for >90 days without documented resolution
WATCH
I-9 expiring or reverification due within 30 days
WATCH
Benefits enrollment deadline approaching with <80% participation rate
System 7 · Action Layer — Trust Ladder
Four autonomy modes — capabilities earn trust, not time
Zara starts at Research Only. Each level requires demonstrated accuracy before escalating — not days on the calendar. You can also grant or revoke autonomy per-task type at any time.
Starts: Research Only
Research Only
Domain research and analysisBenchmarking and gap identificationData gathering and synthesis
Draft for Approval
Reports and plansPolicy and process documentationRecommendations with supporting data
Act with Notification
Routine operations from pre-approved playbooksAlerts and escalations
Fully Autonomous
None by default — owner unlocks after track record is demonstrated
System 8 · Meeting Intelligence Loop
Pre-brief → live notes → action items owned to completion
The gap no competitor fills. Most AI tools stop at the meeting. Zara briefs you before, captures decisions during, extracts action items after, and follows each item to completion — no decisions lost, no follow-through broken.
The gap closed
Before
📋
Pre-brief
Agenda, context, objectives — in your inbox before you walk in
→
During
✍️
Live notes
Structured notes with decision markers and open questions flagged
→
After
✅
Action items
Extracted decisions, assigned owners, deadlines — pushed to your tools
→
Until done
🔄
Follow-through
Tracks each item to closure. Flags stalled items before they become forgotten commitments
System 9 · Outcome Attribution
Tracks what worked, what failed, and why — so mistakes don't repeat
Zara owns their KPIs. Every outcome — good or bad — feeds back into their judgment. Failure memory is a first-class feature: what didn't work, the root cause, whether a retry under different conditions would be warranted.
Self-reporting
Zara's 6 owned KPIs
KPI
Onboarding completion rate (% of milestones completed by day 30, target: >95%)
KPI
90-day new hire retention rate
KPI
Time-to-productivity (manager-rated assessment at 60 days)
KPI
Access deprovisioning time (hours from offboarding trigger to full revocation, target: <24h)
KPI
Compliance training completion rate by deadline (target: 100%)
KPI
HR ticket resolution time (employee request to resolution)
System 10 · Cross-Employee Cortex (CEC)
Persistent shared intelligence across every employee you hire
When Zara discovers something that changes how the business should operate, that organizational intelligence is available to every other employee — without a meeting, without a memo, without anyone remembering to tell anyone.
Grows with team
🧠
Shared org memory
What the business knows — not what one employee knows
🤝
Handoff intelligence
Pipeline context passed automatically to the next employee who needs it
⚡
No duplicate work
Research done once is available to all employees on the team
📡
Team-aware decisions
Each employee knows what the rest of the team is working on