Internal Comms & Meetings

How to prepare an all-hands deck as Small HR Teams

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small HR Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

All-hands prep lands on your plate two weeks before the meeting, which is also the week you're running open enrollment and chasing three managers for overdue performance reviews. You spend half a day pulling headcount numbers from Paylocity, PTO balances from BambooHR or Rippling, hiring pipeline data from Greenhouse, and whatever the CFO sent you in a spreadsheet at 11pm. Then you manually assemble slides in Google Slides, realize the headcount number doesn't match what Finance has, spend another hour reconciling, and send the deck to the CEO with fingers crossed. The whole thing takes 6-8 hours of work you don't have.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small HR Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live HR data surface that pulls headcount, PTO, open roles, and payroll run data from your HRIS and payroll systems so you're never manually copying numbers into slides again

A structured all-hands deck built by describing your talking points to Starch — org updates, hiring progress, benefits changes, team milestones — formatted and ready to present

A repeatable workflow that runs every quarter so the next all-hands takes 45 minutes, not a full day

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Presentation Agent Knowledge Management Investor Reporting

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule (employees, payroll runs, benefits, time off) so headcount and PTO numbers are always current. Greenhouse and BambooHR connect from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries them live when your deck runs. Notion connects from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can pull policy docs and team updates into the narrative. No manual exports.

Prompts to copy

Build me a 12-slide all-hands deck for 150 employees. Include: current headcount by department (pull from Paylocity), open roles and hiring pipeline status (pull from Greenhouse), PTO usage by department this quarter, benefits reminders for open enrollment, two team shoutouts I'll fill in, and a Q&A slide at the end. Use our company colors and keep the tone direct.

Pull together a headcount summary: total employees today vs. start of quarter, net new hires, open roles by department, and any roles that have been open longer than 60 days. I'll use this as the HR section of our quarterly all-hands.

Summarize the key HR updates from the last quarter into a 3-paragraph narrative I can read out loud at all-hands. Cover: headcount changes, any policy updates we rolled out, what's coming next quarter for benefits. Pull from our Notion HR pages for context.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity as a scheduled-sync provider — Starch will automatically keep employee records, department structure, PTO balances, and payroll run data current in its database. This becomes the source of truth for every headcount number in your deck.

2 Connect Greenhouse from Starch's integration catalog. When your deck runs, the agent queries live open roles, pipeline stages, and time-to-fill data — so hiring progress in your slides reflects what's actually in your ATS today, not a CSV you pulled last Tuesday.

3 Connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can reference your HR policy docs, onboarding guides, and any notes you've logged about team milestones or benefits changes when it's writing narrative sections.

4 Open the Presentation Agent app and describe your all-hands deck: number of slides, sections you need, tone, and any specific data points you want highlighted. The agent drafts a complete deck with layouts, your data pulled in, and a narrative structure.

5 Review the HR data section first. Starch pulls headcount and PTO from Paylocity and open roles from Greenhouse — spot-check the numbers against what you know and flag anything that looks off before the CEO sees it.

6 Fill in the human sections: team shoutouts, specific wins you want to call out, anything sensitive that shouldn't come from an automated pull. The deck is a starting point, not a final product — you're editing, not building from scratch.

7 Use the Knowledge Management app to surface any policy changes or benefits updates from Notion that should be mentioned. If you've been maintaining your HR wiki, the agent finds the relevant pages and suggests what to include in the all-hands.

8 Run a headcount reconciliation check: ask Starch to compare employee count from Paylocity against the org chart you have in Notion or Google Sheets. Catch the Finance discrepancy before it becomes an awkward question in the meeting.

9 Export the finished deck to Google Slides or PowerPoint, or share the link directly. Share with the CEO or leadership team for final review — they're reviewing content, not rebuilding slides.

10 After the all-hands, use the Meeting Notes app to capture the Q&A. The agent transcribes, pulls out action items, assigns them by name, and archives the session so when someone asks 'didn't we say we'd fix that benefits thing?' you can find the exact moment.

11 Set a quarterly reminder in Starch so this workflow triggers automatically 10 days before your next all-hands. Your Paylocity data is already synced, your Greenhouse connection is live — next time you're describing changes, not hunting data.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q1 2026 All-Hands — April 3, 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Total headcount (Paylocity, synced Apr 1)	152
Net new hires vs. Jan 1	7
Open roles across Engineering and Sales	5
Average days open for unfilled roles	47
PTO hours used, Q1 company-wide	1,840
Departments with <50% PTO utilization (flagged)	3

It's March 28. All-hands is April 3. You have open enrollment closing the same week. In previous quarters, you spent a full Thursday pulling Paylocity exports, emailing the Greenhouse recruiter for a pipeline update, and fighting with Google Slides while the CEO's edits came in on a different version. This quarter, Paylocity is synced — Starch already has current employee count (152), department breakdown, and Q1 PTO usage without you touching an export. You open Presentation Agent and type: 'Build a 12-slide Q1 all-hands deck — headcount at 152 up from 145, 5 open roles with Engineering Sr. Backend at 47 days open and flagged, PTO utilization low in Ops/Finance/Legal, open enrollment reminder for April 15 deadline, two team shoutouts I'll fill in.' Eight minutes later you have a structured deck. The headcount slide matches Paylocity exactly. The hiring section shows the 47-day open role in context — the CEO will ask about it and you have the Greenhouse pipeline data ready. You spend 30 minutes on shoutouts and tone, not on whether 152 is the right number. You send it Friday morning. The all-hands runs clean.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Hours spent on all-hands prep per quarter (target: under 2 hours)

Data reconciliation errors caught before the meeting (headcount, PTO, open roles)

Number of open roles and average days-to-fill surfaced without manual ATS export

Post-meeting action item capture rate (items logged vs. items actually assigned)

Time from 'deck requested' to 'deck sent to CEO for review'

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Google Slides + manual exports from Paylocity and Greenhouse

You control every pixel but spend 6-8 hours per cycle pulling, reconciling, and building — and the numbers are already stale by the time the deck is done.

Notion + an HR consultant to assemble the deck

Better than a blank slide deck, but you're still manually aggregating data and paying someone to format what Starch can draft from a description.

Rippling or BambooHR built-in reports

Good for headcount and PTO snapshots in isolation, but they don't pull hiring pipeline from Greenhouse, don't write narrative, and don't produce a presentable slide deck.

PowerPoint with a Canva template

Looks polished if you invest the time, but there's no data connection — every number is typed by hand and every quarter you start from scratch.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — presentation agent, knowledge management, investor reporting all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We use BambooHR, not Paylocity or ADP — can Starch still pull our headcount data?

Yes. BambooHR connects from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your app runs. You won't get the scheduled-sync depth you'd have with Paylocity or ADP (where data is stored in Starch on a refresh cadence), but for headcount, department structure, and PTO data at the moment you build your deck, a live query from BambooHR works fine.

What about our ATS — we're on Lever, not Greenhouse?

Lever connects from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries open roles, pipeline stages, and candidate data live. Same outcome as Greenhouse, same live-query connection type.

The Presentation Agent says it's in beta. Can I use it now?

Presentation Agent is currently in development — you can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, Starch can generate a structured narrative and data summary that you paste into your slide template of choice. Not the same, but it cuts the research-and-writing portion of your prep time significantly.

Will the deck numbers always match what Finance has?

Starch pulls from the sources you connect — Paylocity for headcount, Greenhouse for open roles. If Finance is working from a different source or a spreadsheet they maintain separately, you may still need a reconciliation step. The honest answer: Starch eliminates the HR data-gathering problem, but cross-functional alignment between HR and Finance data still requires a conversation if those systems don't agree.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? We're nervous about connecting our HRIS.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If that's a hard requirement for connecting Paylocity or ADP, that's worth knowing upfront. Starch is honest about this. It's on the roadmap.

Can we use this for more than just the all-hands — like team offsites or board meetings?

Yes. The same pattern works: describe the audience, the sections you need, and which data sources to pull from, and the Presentation Agent drafts the deck. A board meeting deck pulling from Stripe, Plaid, and Greenhouse is the same composable pattern as an all-hands pulling from Paylocity and Notion. You describe it, Starch builds it.

What if we want to include information that's not in any connected system — like a CEO message or culture updates?

Those sections are yours to write or dictate. Starch handles the data-heavy slides and drafts narrative framing, but you fill in anything that requires human judgment, context, or sensitivity. The deck is a starting point you edit, not a black box you hand to the CEO cold.