Onboarding Automation: A Complete Introductory Guide

Poor onboarding experiences can negatively impact employee retention, productivity, and the employer’s reputation. Research on 1000 employees shows that one in three have had an underwhelming onboarding experience. You can prevent bad onboarding experiences by engaging in onboarding automation. 

In this post, we’ll discuss the parts of onboarding that you can automate and the benefits of performing this type of HR automation. We’ll also demonstrate how you can implement it at your organization. But to start, let’s review the drawbacks of a traditional, manual approach to employee onboarding.

The Challenges of Onboarding Employees Manually

The following factors explain why most employees don’t think that their employer follows a good onboarding process:

1. The Employee Onboarding Process Feels Impersonal

Your employees need to start engaging with colleagues as soon as possible to be productive. However, when your HR team performs individual tasks manually, satisfying this need becomes nearly impossible. It involves introducing new hires to their colleagues, scheduling one-on-one lunches, organizing offsites, etc. All of these tasks overwhelm an HR department that already has limited time.

2. The Employee Experience Falters

As your employees start their new jobs, they’ll need answers to many questions.

Without an easy, automated means of providing them, they’re either left in the dark or investing too much time searching for answers. Equally bad, they might ask colleagues (especially those in IT) the same set of questions over and over again. This can quickly take up the latter’s time and prevent them from performing more business-critical tasks.

3. Administrative Tasks Move Slowly And Leave Your Team Vulnerable To Making Significant Mistakes 

Manually provisioning employees’ access to facilities and apps and procuring equipment can be time-intensive and challenging to do accurately at scale. As a result, many of these tasks may be delayed, and even once they’re complete, there’s a chance they’re executed poorly.

In either case, the results can be disastrous. For example, new hires may inadvertently gain access to confidential employee data, putting your company in potential legal trouble. The process of completing each new hire’s I-9 document may extend past three days from their start date, leading your organization to face costly penalties.

With this context in mind, we’re ready to dive into onboarding automation, starting with its definition.

What Is Onboarding Automation?

It’s the use of automation to streamline onboarding-related workflows. Its implementation involves a platform that can listen for a predefined business event, where once it occurs, the platform triggers actions that can work across your apps, data, and teams.

Onboarding automation can handle the tasks required to prepare for a new employee. This can be any of the following (and a whole lot more):

• Providing them with the applications and equipment they need
• Scheduling a variety of orientation meetings
• Organizing and distributing all the onboarding documents for review and signing
• Pairing them with a mentor or buddy
• Sending them a package with company swag
• Delivering a survey to gather feedback on the onboarding process

With this context in mind, let’s review how automating your HR onboarding processes can work.

5 Ways to Automate Employee Onboarding

Here are just a few common applications:

1. Streamline Pre-boarding Workflows 

Once an employee is marked as hired in your applicant tracking system (e.g., Greenhouse), you can use an integration-led automation platform to trigger the following actions before their first day:

1. Their profile in your HRIS (e.g., Workday) gets created.
2. Their Okta user account gets set up.
3. A welcome email gets sent to them.
4. Their account in an IT service management system (e.g., ServiceNow) gets created, and a ticket gets added to track the new employee’s progress throughout the onboarding stages.

2. Instantly Provision Apps 

This onboarding automation requires a platform bot to communicate between your business communications platform (e.g., Slack) and the rest of your apps.

Here’s how it works here at Workato.

1. Once a new hire notice—an email alerting key stakeholders of details on the new hire—is sent from an HRIS, the workflow is triggered.

2. An HR chatbot messages the new hire’s manager via your business communications platform, asking them to select the apps they should receive access to.

3. Once the manager makes their selections, the BT team receives a message in a channel within the business comms platform—alerting them of the requested apps.

4. Anyone belonging to that channel can review the request, check if licenses are available across the relevant apps, and then approve (or reject) it.

5. Once approved, the bot notifies the hiring manager via a message in your business comms platform.

Note: As mentioned at the end of the video, new hires can gain access to additional apps, lose access to any, or have their level of access change for a given app at any point (we manage these requests through another chatbot called “Firefighter Bot”).

3. Give New Hires A Place To Connect And Get Their Questions Answered

The following automation ensures that new employees attend an orientation meeting on their first day, have a way to introduce themselves and connect with colleagues who start at the same time.

1. Once your HRIS identifies employees who’ll start at the same time, the workflow gets triggered.

2. Your orientation meeting gets scheduled, and the new hires are invited to it.

3. The new hires get added to your business communications platform channel.

4. Invite New Hires To Lunch With Their Team Members

This automation accounts for employees who work remotely, but it can just as easily work for employees who work in the same office.

1. Once your HRIS identifies recently joined employees, the system triggers the workflow.

2. It then schedules a meeting between a new hire and one of their team members, including details for joining the meeting (via a platform like Zoom) in the invite.

3. On the morning of the day they’re getting lunch, both the new employee and their team member receive a gift card from a food delivery app (via a message in your business comms platform).

5. Send New Hires Swag Before They Start

The following relatively simple automation ensures that every new hire receives company-branded swag a week or so before their official start date.

1. Once the new hire notice is sent out via your HRIS, the workflow gets triggered.

2. The employee receives a pre-selected box of swag from a tool like Printfection the week before their start date.

Related: 18 HR automation statistics that help explain where the candidate and employee experience is headed

Benefits of An Automated Onboarding Process

Now that you know some of the ways you can implement onboarding automation, you likely have a sense of its benefits to your new employees and to the organization.

1. Allows your organization to avoid security risks. Human errors can lead to security issues, such as giving employees access to documents containing a colleague’s personal information. Onboarding automation significantly reduces these errors by streamlining many error-prone tasks.
2. Provides time savings for both hiring managers and employees in HR. Now that hiring managers and employees in human resources can avoid tedious, manual tasks, like hopping between apps to provide new hires with the appropriate apps and equipment, they can focus more on thoughtful and meaningful work.
3. Improves employee productivity from the onset. By providing them with the apps and equipment they need to execute on day 1.
4. Drastically improves employee retention. According to the Human Capital Institute, 69% of employees are more likely to stay with their employer for at least 3 years if they have a positive onboarding experience.
5. Delights your new hires. Since new hires have everything they need to succeed from the get-go, they’re more likely to feel welcomed and empowered. BambooHR verified this: Employees who found their onboarding effective were 30x more likely to report high job satisfaction.
6. Gives your organization a competitive edge. The Human Capital Institute also found that more than half (58%) of organizations’ onboarding experiences focus on paperwork and processes. If your onboarding process can strip away these unpleasant tasks or at least make them easier to complete, your organization should stand out.
7. Inspires new hires to become advocates of your organization. One in five employees wouldn’t recommend their organization to family or friends following their onboarding. Onboarding automation prevents new hires from becoming detractors and increases the chances that they actively promote your organization to others.
8. Provides a means for new hires to socialize. Having casual conversations with colleagues can lead to positive business outcomes, such as increasing employee productivity and satisfaction.
9. Helps your new hires get excited about their jobs. Distributing company swag gives new hires another reason to look forward to working at the company and gives them a positive first impression of your company culture.

According to our research on how businesses are using generative AI to automate business processes, HR departments lead in the percentage of processes that have fully deployed automation. Businesses already have 33% of HR tasks, such as employee onboarding, fully automated.

Here’s what 1000 business leaders said on the progress of GEN AI used to automate tasks in various departments:

How to Automate Any Onboarding Process

There are generally 3 steps you should follow:

1. Identify The Specific Processes That Are Currently Performed Manually

If you haven’t implemented employee onboarding automation in the past, you’ll likely find a variety of manual processes that you can streamline. This can be anything from scheduling the same set of meetings for each new hire to coordinating between the hiring manager and IT to provide the new hire with the right apps and equipment.

2. Prioritize The Processes You Want To Automate

For all the manual tasks you identified in step 1, try to pinpoint those more important to automate based on their potential impact on the new hire, the rest of your team, and the organization more broadly.

The criteria you factor in for every potential automation includes projected time savings, the types of errors likely to be prevented, the number of employees likely to profit, the extent to which new hires benefit, etc.

3. Work With Business Technology (BT) To Build The Automation  

Inform your colleagues in BT which processes you want to automate. Also, walk them through how you’d like the process to operate once automation happens. This includes explaining the business event that triggers the workflow and, once triggered, how the data should move between the systems.

Your colleagues in BT might have better ideas for implementing certain onboarding automation. Coming to them with a clear approach is a great starting point.

Measuring The Success of Onboarding Automation

After you invest in automating onboarding, you need to demonstrate its value. Onboarding metrics and measures such as the following can signal a working or non-working onboarding automation.

1. Cost per hire: Cost per hire includes software license fees for automation tools, advertising, recruiter fees, and training materials. It also includes the cost of compliance violations and bad hires. Cost per hire can help determine if your onboarding automation is efficient in resource use.
2. Candidate satisfaction rate: By conducting surveys on candidates at various hiring stages, you can compare the satisfaction levels before and after onboarding automation implementation.
3. Time to hire: Since most onboarding tasks, such as application review and interview scheduling, are automated, a short hiring time indicates onboarding automation success.
4. Administrative hours saved: Effective onboarding automation should free the HR team from repetitive administrative tasks such as scheduling meetings between new employees and their managers or supervisors, attending to repetitive questions from the new employees, and entering their data into HR systems.

Final Thoughts

The onboarding process involves more than just welcoming a new employee—it sets the foundation for successful employer-employee engagement. Onboarding provides a first impression of an organization’s work culture, sets the tone for long-term engagement, and influences retention and productivity. However, onboarding success relies on delivering a positive experience. Automating the onboarding process streamlines repetitive HR tasks, reduces manual errors, and speeds up processes, enhancing the overall employee experience.