# Keep Former Team Members

When you let an employee go, they don't disappear. Sistava moves them into your Alumni list, where their chat history and work stay intact and readable. If you need them back, one click restores them to active with everything they knew still in place.

Firing an AI employee usually feels riskier than it should be, because the assumption is that everything they knew leaves with them. Sistava does not work that way. When you terminate an employee, they move to the Alumni section of your sidebar instead of being deleted. Their profile, their chat transcripts, and their work history all stay exactly where they were.

The Alumni tab groups former employees into two categories: Fired, for anyone you let go yourself, and Resigned, for the smaller set of employees the platform retired during a system migration. Both groups behave the same way from your side: you can open their profile, reread any past conversation, and see what they worked on before they left. Nothing about that record is hidden or summarized away, it is the same history you had access to while they were active.

What makes this different from a normal archive or export is that the record stays live inside the same employee, not a frozen snapshot you have to dig up separately. A terminated employee is not a closed ticket you reference later, they are a person you can reopen. Click Re-hire on their profile and they return to Active state immediately, keeping the same name, the same accumulated context, and the same conversation thread. You are not starting a new hire from scratch and trying to explain what they used to know.

This matters most when a termination was a judgment call rather than a permanent decision. Maybe an employee was let go while you tested a leaner team, or a role changed and you are not sure the old one is gone for good. Instead of forcing you to either keep every employee active forever just in case, or lose their context the moment you cut headcount, Sistava lets you make the cut and reverse it cleanly if the need comes back.

## What Stays With A Terminated Employee

Every conversation you had with the employee is preserved exactly as it was, viewable from their profile at any time even while they are terminated. You can open the chat, scroll back through past exchanges, and confirm what they were told to do or what they reported back, all without reactivating them first.

Their work record follows the same rule. Files they produced, tasks they completed, and journal entries they logged stay attached to their profile rather than being folded into a generic team log or deleted. If you terminate someone and later want to check what they actually delivered before they left, that record is still there, not something you have to reconstruct from memory.

## Fired Versus Resigned

The Alumni tab splits former employees into two groups so you can tell at a glance why someone is no longer active. Fired covers anyone you terminated yourself, whether that was a performance call, a headcount cut, or a role that no longer made sense. Resigned covers a smaller, specific case: employees the platform itself retired during a past system migration, not something you initiated.

The distinction is informational, not functional. Both groups render read-only chat access and both can be brought back with the same Re-hire action from their profile. You are never blocked from reactivating someone just because of which group they landed in.

## How It Works

**Termination pauses an employee, it does not erase them**

Terminating an employee changes their state from Active to Terminated. That state change disables every schedule the employee had, so they stop running autonomously and stop consuming credits from background work. If the employee was leading a team, leadership passes to another member so the team is never left without a leader.

None of that touches the employee's stored data. Their chat threads, the tasks they completed, and their file history in Drive all remain attached to their profile. The Alumni tab is simply a filtered view: it groups every employee in a Terminated or Resigned state so you have one place to browse former team members instead of hunting for them.

Bringing someone back runs through the same gate a brand-new hire goes through. Re-hiring checks your plan's employee cap and confirms there isn't already an active employee holding that same role slug, exactly like hiring from the Marketplace does. If you're within your limits, the employee's state flips back to Active, their schedules can resume, and their profile shows the update in the activity feed so you can see who reactivated them and when.

## Use Cases

### Testing a leaner team without losing the option to expand back

You trim a team down to cut costs for a quarter, terminating an employee whose role you're not sure you'll need going forward. If demand picks back up, you re-hire them instead of building a replacement from zero, and they come back already knowing your team's context from before.

### Reviewing what a former employee actually delivered

Months after letting someone go, you need to check exactly what they produced or what instructions they were given on a specific task. Their profile and chat history in the Alumni tab still hold the full record, so you can look it up without having reactivated them.

### Correcting a termination made too quickly

You terminate an employee, then realize the role is still needed after all. Instead of losing the setup you'd already put into them, you open their profile and re-hire them, restoring them to Active with their prior conversations and work history still attached.

## FAQ

### If I terminate an employee, do I lose their conversation history?

No. Terminating an employee only changes their state and disables their schedules. Their full chat history, work output, and file history stay attached to their profile and remain viewable from the Alumni tab or their profile page at any time.

### How do I bring a terminated employee back?

Open their profile from the Alumni tab and use the Re-hire action. This runs through the same checks as hiring a brand-new employee, confirming you have room under your plan's employee cap and that the role isn't already filled by another active employee. Once approved, their state returns to Active with their existing history and context intact.

### Does re-hiring a former employee count as a new hire against my plan limit?

Yes. Reactivating a terminated employee goes through the same hire gate as hiring someone new from the Marketplace, so it counts against your plan's active employee cap. If you're at your limit, you'll need to free up a slot first, either by terminating another employee or upgrading your plan.

### What is the difference between the Bench and the Alumni section?

The Bench holds active employees who have not yet been assigned to a working team, they are still working, just not collaborating with others yet. Alumni holds employees who are no longer active at all, either because you terminated them or, in a smaller set of cases, because the platform retired them during a migration. Bench employees can be added to a team any time at no cost; Alumni employees need to be re-hired first.

## Where Keep Former Team Members fits

Keep Former Team Members is part of Things you hire or set up.

Browse a marketplace of pre-built AI agent roles and full teams, or build your own from scratch. Organize them into teams with leaders, set up your org chart, and onboard new hires in minutes. Every employee arrives configured and ready to deliver from day one.

- [Things you hire or set up](/en/features/hire): A full workforce. Hired in seconds.

## Read the guide

- [Guide: Keep Former Team Members](/en/guide/setup/hire-team)

## More in Fast Onboarding

- [Hire an AI Employee](/en/features/hire/hire_individual_employee): Browse the Marketplace and hire an AI employee for a specific role: a department specialist, a personal assistant, or a custom role you define from scratch. Hiring is free and instant. You land straight in the new employee's chat, and every skill, duty, and tool it starts with can be changed afterward from its dashboard.
- [Interview Before Hiring](/en/features/hire/interview_employee): Chat with any employee template before you hire it, on the public marketplace pages or inside the app, to see how it thinks and communicates about your actual work. When you're convinced, say so in the conversation or click Hire; nothing is added to your team until you decide.
- [Employee Builder](/en/features/hire/custom_employee): Employee Builder is the "Build Your Own" card in the Marketplace: instead of hiring a pre-built role, you start from a blank template and set the name, role, and persona yourself. The new hire starts with one skill, Research & Brief, and nothing else pre-assigned, so you add skills, duties, and tools from the Skills, Duties, and Tools tabs to match the exact job you need done. It is a Custom-plan feature; every other plan hires from the marketplace's pre-built roles instead.
- [Personal Assistants](/en/features/hire/personal_assistants): Every account starts with a Personal Assistant already hired, ready to talk before you decide who else to bring on. No marketplace trip, no setup, no decision to make first.
- [Get Started Through Conversation](/en/features/hire/employee_driven_onboarding): When you hire an AI employee, they land in your chat with a short greeting that names their role and what they handle, then ask what you need first. There is no setup wizard, no progress bar, and no settings panel to fill in before they can work. You customize name, persona, skills, and tools later from their dashboard, but none of that is required before the first message.
- [Model Selection](/en/features/hire/model_selection): Every employee runs on a model you choose, not one fixed default. Switch models per employee from the AI Models page whenever a job calls for more reasoning power or a cheaper, faster response.
- [Manage Employee Status](/en/features/hire/employee_state_lifecycle): Pause, resume, or let go of an AI employee without losing anything. Suspend an employee when you don't need them right now and bring them back exactly as you left them, or terminate one and keep their full chat history and work record in your Alumni list. Terminated employees stop counting against your plan's employee limit, and you can re-hire the same role later.
- [Hire a Full Team](/en/features/hire/hire_full_team): Hire a complete pre-built team from the Marketplace in one click: every member configured, a leader assigned, and sprint planning ready to start. Or build a custom team from your existing hires, pick a leader, and set it up yourself. Either way, you talk to one leader and they coordinate the rest.
- [Marketplace](/en/features/hire/marketplace): The Marketplace is where you browse and hire AI employees: two personal assistants, a specialist for every department (Marketing, Sales, Support, HR, Operations), and a Custom AI Talent card if none of the pre-built roles fit. Click a card's photo to preview its skills, duties, tools, and persona before you commit, then click Hire to add it to your workforce and land straight in its chat. Hiring is free; you only spend credits when an employee does work.
- [Employee Avatar Upload](/en/features/hire/employee_avatar_upload): Upload a custom profile photo for any AI employee straight from their Profile tab, replacing the default generated avatar. JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP files up to 5 MB are accepted, and the change takes effect immediately. The photo appears everywhere that employee shows up: chat, the org chart, the virtual office, notifications, and task cards. Any member of your workspace can change it, not only the person who hired that employee.
- [Multiple Workspaces](/en/features/hire/multi_tenancy): Create additional workspaces under the same login, each with its own AI employees, conversations, training data, billing, and collaborators. Nothing crosses a workspace boundary by default, so a separate client, business, or department stays fully isolated. Your plan sets how many workspaces you can create, and you switch between them without signing out.
- [Academy Live Sessions](/en/features/hire/academy_live_sessions): Learn how to put an AI employee to work in a live session with an Applied AI Engineer, tailored to your business. Sessions run about an hour, one on one or in a small group, and walk through the same curriculum as the free Academy course. Free for founders, one hundred dollars per session otherwise.

## Explore

- [Every feature](/en/features)
- [Hire an AI employee](/en/market)
- [Pricing](/en/pricing)