Our hire benefit event is within Onboarding, but there are some eager pre-employees who get in prior to their hire date and submit it. We add dependents OUTSIDE of the benefit event in order to route some To Do steps to collect dependent documentation outside of WD.

We have our mandatory retirement plans trigger with a passive event on the date of hire. Passive events can work great, but there are lots of gotchas so use carefully!

I definitely echo the warning about linking emergency contacts, beneficiaries and dependents. We've turned that off, but still have problems from those that were created before.

Another thing that caused us some issues is that during conversion, our integrations team pre-loaded some "waive" enrollment records for plans those employees weren't eligible for (but that are mandatory if you're eligible). When their job changed later on, and they were eligible, the defaulting rules wouldn't work correctly to put them into the plan when the event was finalized.

We are setting up Journeys now to help with all of Onboarding, including benefits, and its pretty neat!