Managing Employee Onboarding Processes: In-Depth Guide

Employee onboarding is an essential, wide-reaching process in every business. Successfully onboarding new hires means integrating them into the company culture and enabling them to become productive colleagues as quickly as possible.

However, this is also a uniquely challenging process. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, onboarding requires input from a range of colleagues across HR, IT, finance, and the hiree’s own department.

Secondly, although many of the core tasks will be the same, the specific details of how we onboard employees will depend on their role. So, each execution of our process will need to reflect the needs of the individual new hire.

In this first part of our two-part guide, we’re diving deep into how to manage the employee onboarding process.

Specifically, we’ll be covering:

• What is employee onboarding?
• Why is onboarding important?
• 4 stages of the employee onboarding process
• Employee onboarding checklists and trackers
• Handling dependencies, sequencing, and scheduling
• Software tools for employee onboarding
• How to automate the employee onboarding process

Let’s start with the basics.

What is employee onboarding?

The employee onboarding process includes everything from the point at which a new hire accepts an offer until they’re a fully integrated, productive member of the team.

As such, onboarding comprises a range of practical, administrative, technical, resourcing, scheduling, and cultural tasks. For example, scheduling their first day, arranging introductions, organizing training, setting up payroll, and creating log-ins for required systems.

Besides the initial set-up, onboarding also includes longer-term tasks, such as setting expectations, ongoing mentoring, personal development, and other measures that will help hirees settle in and integrate with the existing team.

The important thing to understand here is that onboarding is a highly collaborative process.

This typically begins with HR or the new employee’s line manager initiating the onboarding process by submitting a defined request, creating a new employee record, or manually scheduling all of the required tasks, depending on how deeply automated this is.

Once initiated, we’ll need inputs from colleagues across the company to complete onboarding, including tasks for HR, IT, finance, the hiree themself, and their new department.

Therefore, the biggest difficulty is often scheduling, coordinating, and tracking tasks to ensure that they’re completed on time and in the appropriate sequence.

Later, in this guide, we’ll be checking out some of the concrete tools and strategies we can leverage to handle this successfully.

Why is onboarding important?

First, though, it’s worth thinking about some of the practical ways that onboarding can have an impact.

We can consider this from a couple of distinct but related angles.

On the one hand, we have the potential cost savings of a more efficient employee onboarding process, while on the other hand, there are the value streams associated with effectively integrating new hires into the team.

Let’s check each one out in turn.

Costs

Hiring new staff is potentially a hugely expensive process. This includes all of the costs associated with identifying, interviewing, and recruiting talent, along with the direct costs of onboarding.

For the most part, this is made up of labor hours. In other words, the time that our team spends on recruitment and onboarding. Other costs include procuring equipment or using external service during the hiring process.

In total, the average cost of hiring a new employee is over $4,000, while onboarding can make up about $1,800 of this, according to some estimates .

And that’s largely assuming that everything goes according to plan. We’ll incur additional costs from delays, wastage, or redundancy without the right measures in place.

This is especially important when high-value colleagues such as IT team members or more senior leaders are involved.

Similarly, effective employee onboarding processes can have a huge impact on staff satisfaction and retention rates, helping to reduce our recruitment costs over a longer time horizon.

Value streams

Naturally, the most important way that onboarding drives value is by minimizing the time that’s required for our new colleagues to become productive members of the team in their own right.

In other words, optimizing the time-to-value of our recruitment process.

So, the more effective we are here, the sooner colleagues can start solving the problems we hired them for.

Besides this, our employee onboarding processes can drive value in a few key ways.

One that we mentioned a second ago is enhancing satisfaction and retention among our employees.

On top of this, benefits include fostering a more collaborative workplace culture, ensuring new hires understand and follow internal processes, and helping to ensure robust, centralized provision of resources to colleagues.

4 stages of the employee onboarding process

At the outset of this guide, we noted that a key challenge of employee onboarding is that, although there will always be certain common tasks, the specific steps required when a new colleague joins the team can vary according to their role and other circumstances.

In other words, this isn’t an entirely deterministic process, in the sense that each execution won’t be entirely identical.

From a process management perspective, this makes things a bit trickier, as any digitization or automation solutions we utilize will need to reflect this variation.

But, before we move on to discussing specific solutions, it’s important to outline the basic structure that almost all onboarding processes will follow.

This comprises the following four stages.

1. Preparation and preboarding

Onboarding begins before the employee’s actual start date. The preboarding stage comprises everything that we need to do in advance of their first day.

So, once an offer is accepted and the onboarding process kicks off, tasks must be coordinated across different stakeholders:

• HR team - issue contracts, collect personal and compliance information (IDs, tax, bank details), enter the new hire into the HRIS, trigger background checks, and send welcome communications.
• IT team - create accounts in identity systems, assign licenses for core tools, provision devices and apply device management policies, and make sure required software is installed before handover.
• Finance team - set up payroll records, confirm benefits enrollment, and handle any expense or purchasing approvals related to equipment or relocation.
• The hiree - complete intake forms, provide documentation, review and sign contracts, and confirm availability for start date and orientation.
• The new hire’s department - prepare role-specific resources, schedule introductory meetings, assign a buddy or mentor, and line up initial projects or training modules.

Many of these activities can run in parallel, but some depend on specific sequencing. For instance, HR must create the employee record before IT can provision accounts, and devices must be prepared and shipped to arrive before the new hire’s start date.

2. Orientation

Next, there’s the orientation stage. This typically spans the hiree’s first few days in their new role and focuses on welcoming them, introducing them to company culture, and provisioning the tools, resources, and equipment they need.

At this stage, responsibilities include:

• HR Team - deliver welcome sessions, outline policies and procedures, ensure contracts and compliance documents are in place, and cover any required administrative tasks.
• IT team - provide an overview of system log-ins, MFA setup, VPN access, and internal support channels, as well as basic training on core tools, and helping to troubleshoot any initial issues.
• Finance team - confirm payroll setup and outline expense, reimbursement, and procurement policies and procedures.
• The hiree - attend welcome sessions, confirm accounts and device access, familairize themself with internal policies, procedures, and systems.
• The new hire’s department - team introductions, outlining department-specific tools and processes, setting initial expectations, and organizing mentorship.

Again, all of these tasks don’t necessarily need to follow a strict sequence. However, there will likely be important dependencies. For example, many tasks can’t proceed until hirees successfully gain access to internal systems.

3. Training

The training stage of the employee onboarding process is when a new hire begins to build the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in their new role, as well as enabling teams in other departments that key trainings and compliance requirements are met.

Responsibilities include:

• HR team - conducting policy and compliance training, including workplace conduct, health and safety, diversity, data protection, and grievance procedures, as well as tracking the new hire’s progress through required training modules and programs.
• IT team - providing security awareness training for responsible usage of company assets, and provisioning access to training and LMS platforms.
• Finance team - if relevant, providing training on financial processes, workflows, or compliance requirements.
• The hiree - completing assigned training modules.
• The new hire’s department - providing role-specific training and assigning appropriate introductory tasks.

Each of these tasks may have its own individual deadlines. In terms of dependencies, however, the employee can largely complete the required training in the most convenient order, once LMS access is granted. Exceptions to this include training modules that build on previous learning.

In-person training largely depends on the availability of relevant colleagues.

4. Integration

Lastly, there’s the integration stage of the employee onboarding process. This is where the employee moves from receiving initial training to becoming a fully-fledged member of the team, typically within their first few months in the role.

During this stage, responsibilities of many stakeholders become more light-touch, including:

• HR team - scheduling regular check-ins or surveys to gather feedback on the employee’s experience.
• IT team - transitioning to ongoing service delivery, including providing support and maintaining access to systems.
• Finance team - maintaining payroll, expense reimbursements, or other finance workflows.
• The hiree - actively contributing to projects, building relationships with colleagues, and adhering to internal policies and procedures.
• The new hire’s department - helping to support and mentor the hiree as they grow into their new role.

By this point, most formal onboarding has been concluded, and the employee can begin to drive value in their role.

Employee onboarding checklists and trackers

As you’ll have gathered from the previous section, the employee onboarding process includes a wide variety of tasks that need to be managed across different departments.

So, our attention needs to turn to how we can track and manage this.

In the most basic form, this requires us to have an onboarding checklist. Since the specific tasks required for individual employees can vary, this might be unique to each new hire, at least to some extent.

Here’s an example of what a generic onboarding checklist might look like for each of the stakeholders we identified in the previous section.

Now, in some organizations, this will be a literal checklist on pen and paper. In other cases, it will be handled using a spreadsheet, existing project management software, or a wider HRIS platform.

However, an increasing number of teams are turning to other approaches to handle onboarding. In particular, as onboarding processes aren’t entirely deterministic, planning and tracking constituent tasks is fast becoming one of the most prominent use cases for agentic AI.

In these instances, an agent could be empowered to determine the specific tasks and dependencies required to onboard an employee, before assigning and notifying the appropriate colleagues to complete these, via existing channels or a dedicated onboarding portal.

We’ll return to this idea a little later when we think about specific software tools for handling employee onboarding processes.

Take a look at our guide to AI agentic workflows to learn more.

Handling dependencies, sequencing, and scheduling

Next, we can begin to think in more detail about how we can handle dependencies across onboarding tasks, including how we reflect these in terms of sequencing.

As we’ve hinted at already, the core challenge here is that some onboarding tasks will often be dependent on others. However, other tasks can be carried out independently but are still constrained by factors such as the availability of relevant resources or colleagues.

Therefore, the major difficulty is, first, determining the sequence that we need to execute tasks in, and, second, ensuring that this is adhered to, both in terms of individual tasks and the wider onboarding process.

To achieve this, there are several important strategies we can deploy. These include:

• Identifying hard dependencies - for example, HR must create an employee before IT can provision accounts; accounts must be provisioned before an employee can access training materials, etc.
• Identify parellizable work - for instance, Finance can set up payroll while IT is configuring devices.
• Account for resource constraints - equipment orders depend on vendor lead times, while introductions are subject to colleagues’ availability.
• Use a tracker or workflow tool - ensuring colleagues have visibility into the appropriate tasks for their needs. For instance, HR colleagues will need full oversight of the onboarding process, while departmental colleagues might only need to access their own tasks and certain dependencies.
• Automate where possible - at a minimum, we can notify colleagues when dependencies have been completed and their tasks can proceed. Alternatively, we can automate onboarding tasks in a more wholesale fashion, for instance, triggering IT account provisioning or welcome email flows when a record has been created in the HRIS.

As such, the appropriate tooling is critical.

More specifically, we need to prioritize solutions that enable us to centralize onboarding data, coordinate tasks across HR, IT, finance, and other systems, and build automation logic that reflects the varied executions of employee onboarding processes.

Low-code tools like Budibase are particularly useful here, enabling us to create custom portals, admin panels, and approval apps on top of any data, as well as leveraging custom RBAC, AI-powered automations, free SSO, and much more.

Software tools and systems design for employee onboarding

With a strong grasp of the basic pain points we’re going to want to solve within our employee onboarding processes, we can begin to think in more depth about the concrete solutions that will help us achieve this.

Typically, this will require a combination of the following components.

Data models for employee onboarding processes

Firstly, data modelling for our onboarding process is critical. Essentially, our data model is the structure that underlies our workflows.

At the highest level, onboarding requires two key data entities. These are employees and tasks. In other words, we have an employee who is joining the organization, along with a set of tasks that must be completed to onboard them.

Depending on the complexity of our solution, we might also have additional data objects representing departments, files and resources, roles, systems, assets, requests, or other relevant entities.

Another critical element of this is our internal users. Specifically, our data model must facilitate role-based permissions for onboarding tasks, to enable appropriate users to view and edit task data relating to their specific responsibilities.

In other words, we need to assign the right tasks to IT, HR, or other colleagues, and then provide data access that reflects this.

Intake forms

Employee onboarding processes involve extensive data collection. That is, as part of various tasks, we’ll need to gather structured data. For example, creating a HRIS record, submitting payment information, requesting devices and licenses, selecting benefits, and more.

As such, being able to quickly and easily output secure forms is crucial.

There are a couple of different angles to this. Firstly, there are core forms that will be common to all executions of our employee onboarding process. For example, basic intake forms to create HRIS records.

However, the more challenging element is the fact that we might need to collect different information during various tasks across individual executions of our onboarding process. For example, depending on the hiree’s role or employment terms.

This makes employee onboarding a relatively advanced form use case. There are a couple of approaches we could take to reflect this need for dynamic forms:

• Utilizing conditional logic within forms - Using a single form for all executions of a given task, but dynamically displaying fields based on business logic.
• Conditionally sending static forms - Creating several static versions of a task-specific form, but applying business logic to determine which version to use for an individual execution of our onboarding process.
• Dynamic form generation - Leveraging agentic AI to determine the required data fields, generate a form, and send it to the appropriate user, as part of an onboarding automation flow.

Each of these approaches has distinct pros and cons. For instance, the first two options are simpler and easier to manage, but can only account for a limited set of variations in terms of the data we need for tasks.

Chatbots

Alternatively, a growing number of teams are moving away from tightly structured data collection UIs for internal workflows. Instead, with the rise of AI agents, more teams are interacting with workflows using natural language interfaces.

These might take the form of dedicated tools or bots accessible from existing platforms, such as Slack or Teams.

The goal is to establish a workflow where users can submit a high-level goal, and an AI-powered system determines how to achieve this before taking action autonomously, asking for human input where necessary.

For example, we might prompt a chatbot to initiate onboarding for a new employee. It could then follow up to request the required information, before determining and executing the required tasks, or assigning these to a human operative where this is required.

Take a look at our in-depth guide to digital workers to learn more.

Task management, trackers, and role-specific portals

As we outlined earlier, employee onboarding processes are heavily reliant on effective task management to ensure that constituent tasks are completed on time and in the appropriate sequence.

A crucial part of this is the ability to assign tasks to specific colleagues or teams, as well as reflecting dependencies so that individual agents can know when their assigned tasks are ready to be actioned.

As such, role-based access control is vital. More specifically, we need to have the flexibility to offer different types of colleagues the appropriate level of data exposure and permissions for their needs.

For instance, allowing finance or IT agents to view and edit only the tasks that are assigned to them, while HR admins or departmental managers can have fuller access to the wider employee onboarding checklist.

Individual tasks will typically contain a due date or and status attribute, to provide insight into their current state and when they will be completed.

Admin panels for HR and IT

For employee onboarding to be conducted effectively, we also need to provide capabilities for certain colleagues to manage the flow of tasks. Typically, these are the HR or IT team members who are overseeing onboarding.

Often, this takes the form of an admin panel. Essentially, this is a data management UI that enables users to carry out key admin tasks. Generally, this takes the form of full CRUD operations on our tasks table.

This serves a few key purposes. Firstly, this is where our onboarding checklist can be created for individual hires within a manual process.

Secondly, we can edit or overwrite onboarding flows whether they’ve been created manually or via an automated process. For instance, altering the status or due date of a task, or adding and removing tasks entirely.

Workflow automation tools

Lastly, effective employee onboarding processes rely heavily on workflow automation tools. As we’ll see in the following section, this can take a few forms, depending on the sophistication and complexity of our required solution.

For now, we can simply consider the high-level problems that workflow automation solves in the context of onboarding.

Firstly, automation aims to reduce the number of menial admin tasks that are required within workflows. For example, triggering the next task in a defined sequence, when its dependencies have been completed.

Or, this could be as simple as sending notifications to relevant internal stakeholders based on status changes within tasks.

Perhaps more importantly, in the specific case of onboarding, automation tools enable us to connect otherwise disparate systems, especially across different internal departments and functions.

For example, enabling us to connect our HRIS system to our ITSM request management platform without having to manually configure API requests.

You might also like our round-up of the top employee onboarding software.

How to automate the employee onboarding process

Lastly, as we have alluded to at several points, it’s helpful to think about employee onboarding as a process that’s not entirely deterministic. That is, the constituent tasks that are required can vary from one execution to the next.

As such, any automation tools we utilize for our onboarding workflows will need to reflect this.

So, in order to conclude this guide, we’ll need to understand the different approaches to automation that are available to us, as well as their respective strengths, weaknesses, and ideal use cases.

Deterministic automations

When automation is deterministic, it means that the same outputs will always be provided for the same inputs. In other words, every time the automation is triggered, the exact same static logic will be followed to determine what to do next.

In the simplest forms, deterministic automations consist of a trigger and an action.

Essentially, if this happens, do this. For example, triggering an email to our IT team when a new asset request is received. More complex deterministic automations can also include branching or other logic, but the key thing to understand is that this is static.

Logic might be hard-coded or built using a workflow automation platform, such as Budibase.

This forms the basis of most traditional workflow automations. The benefits of this are pretty clear. Deterministic automation allow us to reliably carry out repeated tasks, reducing the need for a human user to do so.

Deterministic automation rules are widely used within employee onboarding use cases. For example, to handle notifications, send welcome packs, create system accounts, schedule meetings, or escalate overdue tasks.

To some extent, we can even reflect the inherent variety of onboarding flows deterministically.

That is, we can manually create logic to execute different flows for specific roles, only triggering the specific constituent tasks that are relevant to their needs.

However, there are some important limitations to this approach.

One obvious issue is that this requires us to create onboarding automation logic for each individual job role. This might be feasible in very large organizations that regularly hire colleagues to similar roles, but for most companies, this won’t be the case.

Similarly, as onboarding is a diffuse, multi-stakeholder process, reliability can be an issue in deterministic workflows, as it’s difficult to account for all fringe cases. For example, progressing to the next stage could depend on scheduling an intro call with a specific colleague.

Therefore, in a strictly deterministic system, this colleague being out of the office could unduly delay onboarding, unless we’ve accounted for this with fallback logic.

Because of this, many teams leverage elements of non-deterministic automation for their employee onboarding.

Leveraging agentic AI in employee onboarding

As we hinted at earlier, agentic AI means utilizing LLMs to build software systems that can reason and act autonomously when provided with a high-level goal.

This also facilitates natural-language interactions with automated systems. For example, enabling HR colleagues to provide the requirements to onboard an employee, without strictly adhering to a pre-defined form schema.

As such, agentic AI is typically better positioned to reflect the more granular requirements of onboarding individual colleagues and roles.

Similarly, as AI agents are able to reason autonomously and respond to context, they’re often a more effective choice for dealing with complex workflows such as onboarding.

To return to the example of an employee’s onboarding being held up by an out-of-office colleague, an AI agent could use the information and tools available to it to determine and execute a fallback plan.

For example, scheduling a similar meeting with a different colleague or altering the sequence of tasks entirely to reflect this issue.

At the same time, however, agentic AI introduces some challenges of its own. In particular, employee onboarding can be a highly sensitive process, dealing with personal information and, potentially, access provisioning for mission-critical systems.

Therefore, we can’t sacrifice predictability entirely.

Because of this, onboarding processes are a good example of a use case for combined approaches, where we may use deterministic automation rules as callable functions for AI agents, or agentic steps within static workflows.

Check out our round-up of the top low/no-code AI agent builders to see some examples of how this can work.

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