Onboarding a new employee: who makes sure everything is ready?

Thursday afternoon, half past four. Tomorrow Sanne starts at your office, and you know the laptop is there. Whether she has an email address, which folders she may see and who will welcome her at nine o'clock, you're not sure. You'll sort it out tonight, somewhere between the quotes and dinner.

This is how onboarding goes in many small businesses. Nobody is bad at it. The work simply has no owner, because it only comes up a few times a year and there is never time to write it down properly.

How the work goes now

At an accountancy firm with eight people, a new colleague is rarely a big project. It is thirty small things. An email address, access to the accounting software, an explanation of how files are named, an introduction to the regular clients, a first weekly schedule, an email to the whole team. Who handles them depends on who is least busy that week.

You see the same list at a construction company hiring a foreman, or at an estate agency with a new assistant. Safety briefing, work clothes, keys, access to the planning system. The names differ. The shape is the same: a list that lives in someone's head, a half-outdated Word file, and an owner who still has three other things to do at five o'clock.

Suppose that preparation costs two hours per new employee, spread over the week before. If you hire three people a year, that is six hours. It sounds like little. The real loss is in the first days: someone waiting an hour for a password, a colleague explaining the same thing three times, a new employee wondering whether she was expected.

What an agent takes over

The HR assistant in the catalogue drafts onboarding checklists and HR process documentation. You provide the role, the start date and what you already have: an old checklist, an email from last year, a list on the back of an envelope. The agent turns that into a complete checklist, day by day, with for each step who does it and when it needs to be done.

It also writes the welcome email to the new colleague and the announcement for the team, in the tone you use yourselves. If the office already has process documentation, it picks out what applies to this role. If something is missing, for example who hands out the key, it puts that at the top as an open question instead of making something up.

What the agent does not do: create accounts, grant access or send anything. That stays with you. The agent finishes the preparation, so all that is left for you is to decide.

Why you approve an outcome

This is where it differs from an agent you give an assignment and then simply hope for the best. At Stilops you first run a test. You see the checklist as Sanne and her team leader would receive it, the welcome email as it would go out, and the list of questions the agent still has. Only then do you approve.

That is a different question from: do you agree with this plan? An intention you read with goodwill. You see "draft checklist" and assume it will be fine. An outcome you read with your eyes open. You see that day three is empty, that the email addresses Sanne formally while you use the informal form, that the introduction to the client has been forgotten. You find those mistakes in a minute, before they reach anyone.

Approval also remains your moment afterwards. That makes the agent somewhat slower than an integration that passes everything on automatically. For onboarding, where one wrong email lingers on the first day, that is a fair trade.

What it saves

The HR assistant costs 179 euros per month excluding VAT and includes 35 tasks per month. For an office that hires someone three times a year, the price is therefore not the point. The question is what you do with the hours. That means the two hours of preparation per hire, and also the work that comes back afterwards: writing up a probation review, maintaining a job posting, writing down how you do things.

That last part is where it builds up. Every checklist you approve is the starting point next time. After the third hire, you no longer have to remember anything.

How to start

Take the last employee you hired and write down what you did the week before. It doesn't need to be tidy. Provide that as input and let the test run show what an agent makes of it. If the checklist is right, you approve it. If something is missing, you see it now, and not on Friday morning at nine o'clock.