How does Joinly sync Hailey HR to Active Directory?

Joinly reads each HR change in Hailey in the cloud through the Hailey HR API, then hands the action to the Joinly AD Agent inside your network, which makes the change in Active Directory. Hailey HR Core holds the authoritative employment record; the agent is the only component that touches your domain.

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Hailey. Joinly reads the new employee record, determines the role from department, location and title, and instructs the AD Agent to create the user in the correct OU, build the sAMAccountName and UPN from your rules, and add the right security groups — timed to the employment start date.

2. Mover. When someone changes department, location or title, Joinly tells the agent to move the user to the matching OU, swap security-group membership and update attributes. Access that no longer fits the new position is removed, so permissions stay aligned with the actual job.

3. Leaver. On the end date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU, so no login stays active after someone has left.

Example: A creative agency runs Hailey HR and an on-premise AD across two studios. It hires a motion designer with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the employment record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Studio-Amsterdam > Creative OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Design-Team and Adobe-Licensed groups. When the designer later moves to the Rotterdam studio, the agent moves the object to the new OU and swaps the groups the same day.

What manual AD account management costs

Without automation, every account starts as a request that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. Hailey can’t help here at all: its native integration targets cloud Entra only, so on-premise AD is entirely manual unless you automate it.

• Onboarding delays. New joiners wait for an AD account and group access while a request sits in a queue, losing productive days in their first week.

• Permissions that don’t keep up (privilege creep). When movers change department, old security-group membership often stays attached, so people accumulate rights they no longer need.

• Forgotten offboarding. Accounts that aren’t disabled on time are a security and audit risk — and on a small IT team it is easy for an old account to slip through unnoticed.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Hailey has no native path to on-premise AD, so the realistic alternative is Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent writing to AD. It can push data to on-premise AD, but it stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare for a Hailey-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Hailey HR to Active Directory

A few details decide whether this connection stays reliable as you grow.

• sAMAccountName uniqueness and length. AD limits the sAMAccountName to 20 characters and it must be unique across the domain. Joinly builds it from your rules with a fallback pattern, so duplicate names never produce a collision or a truncated, unreadable login.

• OU placement from a flat org model. Hailey’s department, legal entity and location fields are flexible rather than a deep hierarchy, so they don’t map one-to-one to your OU structure. Joinly builds explicit rules that place each user — and move them on a transfer — into the correct OU.

• No native AD path from Hailey. Hailey’s own integration is cloud-Entra only, so there is no supported route from Hailey to on-premise AD without automation. The Joinly AD Agent provides that route directly, reading Hailey and writing to your domain.

• API key scope and matching. Hailey’s API returns employee data according to the rights on the key, which you request from Hailey Support. Joinly connects with a correctly scoped key and matches people to existing AD objects on import, so it updates the right account instead of creating duplicates.

• Service-account permissions. The agent acts under a service account with delegated rights. Joinly works with least-privilege delegation scoped to the target OUs, so the agent can create, move and disable users without domain-admin rights.

Joinly handles each of these by default with custom mapping and transformation.

Always audit-ready

Every account action the Joinly AD Agent performs is logged in the Joinly cloud: who was affected, when it happened, which OU and groups changed and which Hailey HR change triggered it. For NIS2 that matters directly: access can be traced back to an authorised HR source rather than an ad-hoc request. Joinly is ISO 27001 certified, runs in an EU data centre in Amsterdam, applies least-privilege by default, and is built to meet NIS2 and ISO 27001.

Example case

Take a creative agency with around 220 employees across two studios, running Hailey HR but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its design workstations, file shares and licensed creative apps. Every new designer, producer or account manager starts as a request that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. Hailey’s own integration can’t help here at all, because it only targets cloud Entra, so the on-premise side is entirely manual and new joiners regularly wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Hailey HR to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user in the right OU on the start date, builds a unique sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, moves people between studios on a transfer and disables accounts on the end date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Hailey.

“Hailey stops at the cloud, so our on-premise AD was pure manual work for every hire. Now an account is simply ready in the right OU when the designer walks in, transfers move themselves, and we can show exactly which Hailey change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, creative agency

The outcome this setup is designed for: onboarding drops from days to zero touch, privilege creep from old roles is eliminated, and the team can walk into its next NIS2 assessment with a complete, source-backed audit trail.