I can still see deleted employees in dropdown lists

When you click the delete button next to an employee, it does not actually remove the employee from the system, it just sets them to inactive.

The reason behind this is that the system uses employee names as a reference point for other types of information. If deleted permanently, this would affect the other records which have to be retained. For example, If we delete an employee and then review their timeoff record, the name would be missing as it would refer to this employee who is no longer in the system. For this reason, we leave the employees, but in a hidden capacity so that legacy requests still maintain a point of reference.

Archived employees list those employees where you have completed the leaver process (i.e. they have a leave date and a leave reason rather than just being deleted) – these are also hidden from the system in things like drop-down menus as they also should not be selectable but are kept for data retention purposes and in case you want to bring them back as an active employee if they return to your organization.

If you add an employee again for whatever reason, this can mean you end up with multiple entries for an employee though only one might be visible in the employee module – this is why sometimes you may see two entries for a manager in the manager dropdown list for example, as one is the current one and one the deleted one. The challenge of course, is that there is no easy way of you knowing which is the current one and which the deleted one so this is why we add checks to only list the current ones.

There are various fields within the system which will check for a unique value in an attempt to stop employee records from being duplicated, fields such as SIN, Work ID, and work email address will all demand a completely unique value before an employee can be added to the database. 

We also have a hidden process that will remove all deleted employees permanently, but you need to be aware it MAY impact some records like time off, timesheets etc., where the employee name or manager name may no longer be listed. If an employee is reporting to that deleted employee and has never been changed, this also will result in inconsistency.