Clean way of passing parameters I have the following code:

public EmployeeProcessOutput  RetrieveEmployee(EmployeeProcessInput input)
{     
    var employee = input.Employee;

    if (input.EmployeeId == null)
        employee= CreateEmployee(employee);

    return new EmployeeProcessOutput
    {
        Employee = employee,
        State = "Stored" 
    };
}

private Employee CreateEmployee(employee)
{
    //Call a service to create an employee in the system using the employee info 
    //such as name, address etc and will generate an id and other employee info.
    var output = Service(employee)
    var employee = output.Employee;
    return employee;
}


Is there a clean way and of passing the employee parameter to the CreateEmployee method?  I feel that this line could be cleaner:  

employee = CreateEmployee(employee);


Any thoughts?
Have a look at this. I think the real question is pass by value vs pass by reference. 

More info here.

Edit:
The line could be modified to following:

CreateEmployee(ref employee);


and the method name would be: 

private void CreateEmployee(ref employee)