Removing users from automatic groups

Hi ​@melissa.may ,

In the organizations I’ve worked with, this is a classic "Boomerang Employee" challenge. The short answer is: No, you cannot manually remove a user from an automatic group and expect them to stay out. As soon as the background group-refresh task runs, the system will re-evaluate the user against the conditions and pull them right back in.

The most reliable way to handle this—and what I typically implement for teams facing this—is to introduce an Exclusion Property to your group logic.

Instead of relying on manual removal, you should create a specific "User Additional Field" (e.g., a dropdown or checkbox named "Exclude from Automatic Onboarding"). You then update your automatic group rules to include a negative condition:

• Job Title equals [X]

• AND Exclude from Automatic Onboarding is not equal to "Yes"

This allows you to "manually" control their membership by simply toggling that field on their user profile. The system then sees they no longer meet the criteria and removes them automatically.

An other great alternative is date condition: This is a great alternative if you want to automate the exclusion entirely. You can add a rule where the "Start Date" must be after a specific date (e.g., Jan 1st, 2026). This ensures that anyone rehired who has an older original start date in the system won't trigger the onboarding group again.

You can find the specifics on managing group rules and additional fields here: Creating and Managing Groups

Let me know if you want to dig deeper into the logic for those date-based rules!

Thank you, Sadly, returning employees get a new start date. We are exploring additional fields and seeing if we can get it added to our HR system first, so it’s automatically populated for all employees, if not, I like the idea of still having an additional field and just going to those returning employees and adding this information. This is helpful- thank you for those ideas!

Hi ​@melissa.may,

Another idea to build on what ​@Moshe.Machlav said above, for boomerangs and groups for onboarding one thing that I use is completion status in an onboarding course (or the last onboarding course in a LP) to “anchor” users in onboarding, until they’ve completed the course.

For example, if my Onboarding LP has 3 courses and the last one is called “Final Day of Onboarding”, I’d make my group have the condition based on an Enrollment Based Status Condition > choose the “Final Day of Onboarding” course and the status for the course as “Enrolled” for condition 1, and another condition with the status “In-Progress”. Last step would be to make the condition of the set that at least one condition in the set must be satisfied and you’re rolling!

This way, the moment they’ve completed the onboarding course, they’d be bumped out of the group - assuming your boomerang hire has that course in their learning history, they wouldn’t end up in that group at all.

Hope that helps!