Seasonal or project-based roles
Hire a social media employee for a launch, suspend them the moment the campaign wraps, and reactivate them for the next one without rebuilding their tools, skills, or conversation history from scratch.
Manage Employee Status
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.
Every AI employee you hire moves through a small set of clear states: active, suspended, or terminated (a system-forced version of the same exit is called resigned). You control the first two directly from the employee's own dashboard menu, and the state is always visible next to their name so you know at a glance who's working and who isn't.
Suspending an employee pauses their work without deleting anything. Schedules stop firing, they can't send or receive new work, and the platform will not run them again until you reactivate them. Everything they built, every conversation, every file, every skill and tool configuration, stays exactly as it was. It's the right move for a role you need occasionally, not constantly, like a seasonal social media push or a project that's between phases.
Terminating an employee is the permanent version, but it still isn't a deletion. The employee moves into the Alumni section of your sidebar, their chat history stays readable (you just can't send new messages to it), and their record stops counting toward the number of employees your plan allows. That last part matters if you're near your plan's limit: firing a role you no longer need frees up a seat immediately, without a support ticket or a billing conversation. If you decide later that you do need that role again, the same dashboard menu offers a one-click re-hire, which creates a fresh instance of that employee. The only restriction is you can't have two active employees on the exact same template at once, so re-hiring while an active one is already running is blocked until you suspend or terminate the original.
This is a deliberate design choice: your team roster should be able to flex up and down with actual demand the way a real team does, without every change turning into a data-loss risk or a support conversation. You decide who's on the clock; the platform keeps the record either way.
Suspend vs Terminate
Suspend is the pause button: use it when a role goes quiet for a stretch but you know you'll need it again soon, like a marketing employee between campaigns. Nothing about the employee changes except that they stop running; flip them back to active and they pick up exactly where they left off, same tools, same skills, same conversation.
Terminate is the exit: use it when a role is done for good, or when you're testing different templates and want to keep your active roster and your plan's employee count clean. The employee's history doesn't disappear, it moves to Alumni where you can still read it, but they're off the clock and off your bill. If you're wrong and need the role back, re-hiring takes one click from the same menu.
Why This Matters For Your Plan
Every plan caps how many active employees you can run at once. Terminated and resigned employees are excluded from that count, so cleaning out roles you're not using is a direct way to free up room for new hires without upgrading your plan. Suspended employees, by contrast, still occupy their seat since they're still technically active, just paused, which is the tradeoff for keeping them ready to resume instantly.
This split gives you two different levers depending on the situation: suspend when you want to keep the seat reserved for a near-term return, terminate when you'd rather reclaim the seat and re-hire fresh later if needed.
How It Works
Three states, one menu, nothing ever deleted
Every employee record carries a lifecycle state: active, suspended, terminated, or resigned. Active is the normal working condition. Suspended and terminated are both things you trigger yourself from the employee's dashboard menu; resigned is reserved for the rare case where the platform itself has to end an employment, such as a system migration, and it behaves like termination from your side, the employee lands in Alumni with their history intact.
Within the active state, a separate work status tracks what the employee is doing right now: available, working, awaiting your input, on hold, or hit an error. This is the live indicator you see change while they're processing a request; it only applies to active employees and resets each time they finish a task.
Suspending flips the employee out of the active state so scheduled and triggered work stops immediately, but every other record, chat, tasks, drive files, tools, skills, and duties stays attached to that employee unchanged. Reactivating simply flips the state back; there's no re-setup step.
Terminating moves the employee into the Alumni virtual team. Alumni employees keep their full chat and work history visible for reference, but the composer is locked so no new messages can be sent to them, and they're excluded from your plan's active employee count. Re-hiring from Alumni creates a new instance from the same role template rather than reviving the old record, and is blocked only while another active employee already occupies that exact template.
Use Cases
Trying out different roles without cluttering your roster
Hire a template, work with it for a few days, and terminate it if it's not the right fit. It moves to Alumni, stops counting against your employee limit, and you can re-hire a different template in its place immediately.
Freeing up a seat on a capped plan
If you've hit your plan's active employee limit and need to bring on a new role, terminating an employee you're not actively using releases their seat right away, no plan upgrade or support request needed.
Keeping a paper trail after someone leaves the roster
Because terminated employees land in Alumni instead of being deleted, you can still open their chat later to reference what they worked on, useful for audits or picking up context if you ever re-hire the same role.
FAQ
Does suspending or terminating an employee delete their data?
No. Suspending keeps everything untouched, chat history, tasks, drive files, tool and skill configuration, and simply stops the employee from running. Terminating moves the employee to your Alumni list where the chat history and work record stay readable; only sending new messages to them is blocked.
Can I bring back a terminated employee?
Yes. The employee's dashboard menu in Alumni offers a re-hire option that creates a new instance from the same role template. The only time this is blocked is if you already have another active employee running that exact same template, in which case suspend or terminate that one first.
Do suspended employees still count against my plan's employee limit?
Yes, because they're still in the active state, just paused. Only terminated and resigned employees are excluded from your plan's active employee count. If you're trying to free up a seat rather than pause work, terminate instead of suspend.
What's the difference between an employee's state and their status?
State is the lifecycle position: active, suspended, terminated, or resigned, and it changes rarely, usually only when you act. Status is a live indicator that only applies while an employee is active: available, working, awaiting your input, on hold, or error, and it changes constantly as they process requests.
What happens to an employee's scheduled or recurring work when I suspend them?
Their schedules stop firing the moment they're suspended, so no recurring or triggered work runs while they're paused. Reactivating the employee does not automatically replay missed runs; their schedules simply resume from the next normal trigger.
Where Manage Employee Status fits
Manage Employee Status 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: A full workforce. Hired in seconds.
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More in Fast Onboarding
- Hire an AI 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
- Hire a 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.
- 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.
- 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: 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: 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: 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.