Onboarding a new hire involves more paperwork than it should: documents to collect, an offer letter to sign and countersign, a company email account, and dates that must not be missed later. We built the flow into our own applicant tracking system so none of it depends on someone remembering.
The flow
- An offer email goes out the moment the candidate reaches the offer stage.
- A few minutes later, the candidate is asked for the documents their role needs. Identity documents are never requested by email.
- When the documents arrive, the offer letter goes out for e-signature.
- Once signed, it’s countersigned (automatically under a standing authorization, or by a named company signer), and the final copy is filed and emailed.
- An hour later, a company email account is created with a one-time sign-in link.
- Then the onboarding packet is sent.
Every step happens once and is recorded with its time. HR can run a step early, skip it where that’s safe, pause the flow or stop it.
After day one
- Document expiry dates: HR is emailed ahead of each date that matters.
- Exit: once a person’s last day has passed, sign-ins to their company mailbox are suspended. Mail still arrives, so nothing is lost.
Where it shows up
HR sees the autopilot status in the onboarding documents list, on each person’s packet and on the offer page, so there’s one place to look rather than a separate tool.
What we learned
The automation was the easy part. The work was in deciding which steps must never run without a person, such as countersigning without an authorization or asking for identity documents by email, and making those boundaries impossible to cross by accident.
- 8onboarding steps, each recorded once
- 3reminders before each document expiry date
Figures on this page are counted from our own code and test suite each time the site is built.