Automating new employee onboarding ✨
How you can use Zapier and Slack to make employee onboarding a breeze 🏃🏽♂️
We all know how time consuming and tedious employee onboarding can be 🥵. There are often a dozen different logistical items that need to be done when you make a new hire. See below for a number of to-do's on our own onboarding checklists:
✉️ Email cadence from offer extended to 2 weeks, 1 week, 1 day before start date
🤝 Assigning onboarding buddy
✏️ Sending pre and post onboarding surveys
⚒️ Ordering equipment
👋🏽 Creating welcome package for new hire
📆 Creating 30/60/90 Day Plan for new hire
📃 Creating onboarding document for new hire
💼 Adding new hire to company-wide and team specific tools
1️⃣ Scheduling 1:1s with manager, peers and 30 day check-in
💸 Confirming that employee is enrolled in benefits, i-9 was completed, board approval of option grant
That’s a lot! 🤯 Wouldn’t it be nice if we could automate a bunch of that? 😏 For this post, we chose to focus on the following key automations, and you can easily duplicate these templates (found at the bottom of the post) and edit them for your own needs.⚡
👨💼 Onboarding survey for hiring manager and new employee
🆕 Creation of GSuite account for new employee
💬 Welcome message in Slack
🤝 Assigning onboarding buddy
🆕 Inviting new employee to preset Slack channels
2️⃣ Sending onboarding survey after two weeks
Let’s dive in.
Onboarding Surveys ✏️
The basis for all of the automations going forward is the data from two surveys: one filled out by the hiring manager and the other by the new hire. An ancillary benefit to automating your employee onboarding is that, in the process, you have to create an employee database with all of your team’s information. We recommend Airtable for this 💪🏽.
For the hiring manager form, see below for the questions we’re asking to make sure we have all the data we need:
What is the new hire’s full name?
What is the new hire’s personal email address?
What will the new employee's work email address be? Please include the text before @company.com only [this is for the Make automation]
When is the new hire starting?
What team is the new hire joining?
What is the new hire’s title?
Who should the new hire’s onboarding buddy be?
What is the onboarding buddy’s work email address?
Which Slack channels should the new hire be added to? (pre-set options)
For the new hire form, we ask questions about the equipment they’d like, their mailing address, what they’re passionate about (so we can share with their new teammates), and details about their favorite food/activities/restaurants so we can send them a custom welcome package. We won’t go into too much more detail here since we aren’t building any automations based off this information right now.
Now that we have the forms we need, make sure you have a corresponding table with all the fields appropriately titled. Then we can get started building your automated onboarding flow! ✨
Automation Time 🤖
Automating the creation of a GSuite account
Log into Make (formerly known as Integromat) and set up a “scenario” that starts with “watch responses” on Airtable (connect your Airtable webhook following these instructions), then “get a record” on Airtable by picking your base, table and record ID, and finally connect with Google workspace to provide the details you need to create a Google account.
Sending a Slack invitation
Here we’ll show you how to automate Slack invitations to the new hires. First, make sure to create a permalink invite for Slack.
Then, create a column and corresponding filtered view to trigger Slack invitations to new employees:
Finally, create the Zap that triggers when new records enter your newly created filtered view.
Internal Slack Automations
These next four automations all have the same foundation: once your new employee creates their new Slack account with their shiny new company email, we’re going to use the “New User Trigger” for Slack via Zapier to automate customized messages and invites to specific channels.
After the “new user” trigger, look up the new user’s email in your master Airtable base so you can find the onboarding buddy/Slack channels/etc.
Finally, connect with Slack to send a custom message or invite them to the custom channels you had pre-designated.
For the “onboarding survey” Zap, the only thing we added was a time delay for two weeks before sending the custom Slack message.
➕ Bonus: Automating 1:1s for New Hire
You can also trigger another automation after a New User joins Slack, but this time geared towards ensuring that all the right 1:1s and conversations get set up.
On your initial form, you should have selected all the team members that your new hire should have a 1:1 with in their first month.
This Zap will send a DM to each of those team members when your new employee has joined Slack, and tell them to find a time to talk within X weeks. Importantly, it should also prompt them to fill out a quick form once they’ve scheduled that one on one.
That form should update a column in Airtable corresponding to the meeting booking and the date, so that you can keep track of all the important meetings your new hire should be having in their first few months on the job.
You can also set up an automation (or another step based on a delay) to check if the field is filled out within X time, and send reminder messages to the teammates to make sure they’ve scheduled their meetings.
Templates (Airtable & Zapier)
Employee Onboarding Database - Airtable
Welcome Message in Slack - Zapier
Onboarding Buddy Intro in Slack - Zapier
Invite new users to Slack channels - Zapier
Sending Onboarding Survey 2 Weeks after New Hire Starts - Zapier