Onboarding Hub App Overview

Onboarding Hub

1. What it is

Onboarding Hub manages the journey from “offer accepted” through a new hire’s first months. You build templates that bundle tasks, documents, forms, checkpoints, trainings, and surveys, then assign them — manually or automatically — when someone is hired. New hires can start preboarding before day one through a secure portal, and the app tracks completion, sends reminders, and monitors I-9 and compliance status.

• Enablement: Requires a license. An admin enables it from Admin → Apps Marketplace. It is not turned on automatically.
• What it is not: Onboarding Hub covers the inbound journey. Offboarding (structured employee departures) is a separate app. Training courses are authored in the Training app — Onboarding Hub assigns them as plan items, it does not create them. The Forms app builds the form templates — Onboarding Hub pulls them into a plan as enrollment forms.

2. Standing it up

1. Enable the app — go to Admin → Apps Marketplace, find Onboarding Hub, and enable it.
2. Create at least one template — go to Onboarding Hub → Templates → New Template. A template defines everything a plan contains: tasks, milestone checkpoints, documents to collect, forms to fill, and their day-offset schedule. Set the template type (Standard, Executive, Technical, Custom, or Department-specific), role level (Entry, Mid, Senior, or Executive), and optionally a department and location scope so the auto-matcher can pick the right one later.
3. Stock the libraries — populate the Tasks, Documents, Forms, and Welcome Content libraries so template authors can pull from a shared catalog. Use Load Default Data under Settings to seed industry-standard items if you want a starting point.
   • For a ready-made set of pathways, use Settings → Load Default Data → Starter Pathways: Hourly and Salaried new hires, a New Leader pathway and an Internal Transfer and Promotion pathway, in a standard or a hospitality variant. Installing again restores any pathway you haven’t changed and keeps one you’ve edited exactly as you left it; library items your libraries don’t have are left out and listed.
4. Set up relationship types — Mentor and Buddy are seeded automatically. Add any custom types your program needs (e.g. Executive Sponsor, Skip-Level Manager) under Settings → Relationship Types. Mark a type as Required if every plan must have it assigned before it can start.
5. Grant access — admins and managers can create and manage plans. App Admins (granted through Admin → Roles) have manager-equivalent access. Employees see only their own onboarding plan; an employee who leads a team also sees their team’s plans on the Plans list. Settings and compliance configuration are admin-only.
6. Confirm it worked — create a test plan for an employee, start it, and check that the employee sees their tasks under Onboarding Hub → My Onboarding. Verify that the hiring manager receives the plan-created notification.

Silent dependency: If you turn on Create the onboarding plan on hire under Settings → Automation, the auto-onboard needs either a pinned template or at least one active template that matches by role, department, or location. Without a matching template, the automation runs silently and creates nothing.

3. How it fits together

Templates and plans — A template is a reusable blueprint. A plan is a live instance created for one person. Templates hold items (tasks, checkpoints, documents, forms) with day offsets relative to the start date; when a plan is generated from a template, those offsets produce concrete due dates. Plans move through five statuses: Draft → Preboarding → Active → Completed (or Paused at any point after activation). A plan can only be completed when all required items — required tasks, critical checkpoints, required documents, required enrollment forms, required surveys, and required trainings — are finished. Optional items do not block completion.

Template matching and pathways — When you create a plan (or auto-onboarding fires), the system scores every active onboarding template; pre-start experience templates are never picked as the plan’s template. A template can be set up as a pathway: the lifecycle events it is for (new hire, rehire, promotion, transfer, becoming a people manager) and the audience it is for (for example Hourly team members). What happened to the person counts most — a pathway for their event beats a template that names none, and a rehire also matches a new-hire pathway — then who they are (a pathway for an audience they belong to beats one for everyone), then location scope, role level and department. Location scoping has four modes: Any (business-wide), Specific (exact location match), Regional (location is an ancestor of the employee’s), and Headquarters (employee is at the business’s HQ). The most-specific match wins, with ties broken by most recently created. Admins can also pin a specific template for auto-onboarding, bypassing the matcher. Hourly and Salaried audiences read each person’s FLSA status when it is recorded, otherwise their pay basis, which is set from the job when a candidate becomes an employee.

Standalone vs. recruiting mode — Plans can be created in two ways. In recruiting mode, the plan is linked to a Job Board candidate — the candidate’s job, hiring manager, and offer data carry over. In standalone mode, you pick any employee directly, fill in the job title yourself, and say what the onboarding is for — a new hire, a rehire, a promotion, a transfer, or someone becoming a people manager — so the suggested template is the pathway for that event. A promotion, transfer or new leader’s plan is an internal move: the new-hire paperwork (I-9, W-4, employment agreement, direct deposit, benefits enrollment) is not added, and Analytics counts it as a move rather than a new hire.

Internal moves — With Create an onboarding plan for promotions, transfers and new people managers on (Settings → Automation), a plan for the new role is created automatically when a promotion, a move to another department or location, or a move into management (a job title marked as a leadership position, or being marked a people leader) is recorded. It follows the same start and welcome-email choices as a plan created on hire.

Task assignment roles — Every task in a template is assigned to a role: New Hire, Hiring Manager, Mentor, Buddy, HR Team, IT Team, or Admin. Tasks can also be assigned to a recipient group, which either fans out into one task per group member or assigns to a single lead. Role-based assignment resolves to the actual person when the plan is created.

Preboarding — Plans in Preboarding status give new hires access to a secure, token-based portal before their start date. The portal shows only items scheduled as Before start — day-one and post-start items stay hidden until the start date. A daily job at 6 AM UTC auto-activates preboarding plans whose start date has arrived, transitioning them to Active and sending the day-one welcome notification.

Relationship types — Beyond the built-in Mentor and Buddy columns, admins can create custom relationship types (e.g. Department Lead, Executive Sponsor) and mark them required or optional. Each plan supports one assignment per type. System-default types (Mentor, Buddy) cannot be deleted; any type that is already in use on a plan cannot be deleted until removed.

4. Running it

Creating a plan manually

1. Go to Onboarding Hub and click New Plan.
2. Choose Recruiting mode (select a hired candidate) or Standalone mode (select an employee, enter the job title, and choose what the onboarding is for).
3. The system suggests a template — the pathway for the event and the person, then by role, department, and location. Accept the suggestion or pick a different one.
4. Set the start date, hiring manager, and optionally a mentor and buddy.
5. Save. The plan is created in Draft status with items generated from the template.

Starting preboarding

1. Open a draft plan and click Start Preboarding. The plan moves to Preboarding status.
2. The new hire receives an email with a link to their preboarding portal — this reaches their personal email before they have a company account.
3. In the portal, the new hire can complete before-start tasks, fill enrollment forms, upload documents, and view welcome content.

Managing documents and e-signatures

1. Each plan lists the documents it requires (ID, tax, benefits, background check, etc.). New hires upload files through the portal or the app.
2. Documents that need a signature can be sent through the native e-signature flow or a connected provider (DocuSign, HelloSign, Adobe Sign, PandaDoc).
3. After upload, an admin or manager verifies or rejects each document. Rejected documents send a notification so the new hire can re-upload.

Reviewing I-9 compliance

1. Go to Onboarding Hub → Compliance Report (admin or HR admin only).
2. The dashboard shows employees with incomplete I-9s, work authorizations expiring within 30, 60, or 90 days, and employees pending reverification.
3. Trigger a reverification from the dashboard — this creates an I-9 Section 3 enrollment form on the employee’s plan.

Using the analytics dashboard

1. Go to Onboarding Hub → Analytics. The executive analytics view shows average time-to-completion and completion rates across plans, and new hires against exits.
2. The onboarding analytics view shows plan counts, overdue items, and status breakdowns, and breaks onboarding down by department, location, or pathway. New hires and moves (promotion, transfer and new-leader plans) are counted separately. Time to productive is the number of days from a plan’s start date to the completion of its final milestone checkpoint, averaged over the plans signed off in the period you pick.
3. For a single plan, open it and choose Audit Report — a per-employee trail of every form, document, communication, and compliance item with timestamps. The audit report exports to CSV.

Automated background operations

Several daily jobs run without admin intervention:

• Preboarding auto-activation — daily at 6 AM UTC. Plans in Preboarding whose start date has arrived are transitioned to Active, and each new hire receives a day-one welcome.
• Form and document reminders — daily at 8 AM UTC. Each business’s configured reminder triggers (3 days before, on due date, etc.) are evaluated and reminders sent.
• Checkpoint reminders — daily at 8 AM UTC. Checkpoint owners are reminded about checkpoints scheduled for the next day.
• Overdue alerts — daily at 8 AM UTC. Hiring managers are notified about plans with overdue items. Plans older than 90 days past their target completion stop generating alerts.
• Weekly digest — every Monday at 9 AM UTC. Each hiring manager receives a summary of their active plans’ status.
• Scheduled preboarding emails — daily at 7 AM UTC. Sends admin-authored preboarding email campaigns to new hires based on a configured schedule.
• Department notifications — every 30 minutes. Processes and sends pending department notification alerts (e.g. notifying IT about equipment setup).

5. Settings

All settings are at Onboarding Hub → Settings (admin only).

General

Setting	Default	What it changes
Pre-start portal access	On	Lets new hires access the preboarding portal before day one. When off, they see a “see you on day one” page instead.
Onboarding AI agent	On	Enables the read-only Onboarding agent in Ask AI for employees.
Onboarding admin agent	On	Enables the admin Onboarding agent in Ask AI.
Require identity re-verification for document downloads	Off	When on, downloading onboarding documents requires the user to re-authenticate first.

Automation

Setting	Default	What it changes
Create the employee account on hire	Off	Automatically creates an employee record when a Job Board candidate is marked hired.
Create the onboarding plan on hire	Off	Automatically generates an onboarding plan from a matched (or pinned) template when a candidate is hired.
Start the plan immediately	Off	When on, auto-created plans start in Preboarding status instead of Draft.
Email the new hire their welcome on auto-onboard	On	Sends the plan-created notification to the new hire when auto-onboarding fires.
Activate the plan on the start date	Off	A daily job transitions preboarding plans to Active on their start date and sends the day-one welcome.
Create an onboarding plan for promotions, transfers and new people managers	Off	Creates a plan for the new role when a promotion, a transfer, or a move into management is recorded — from the pathway set up for that event when there is one. The new-hire paperwork is not added.

Notifications

A master Automated reminders switch (default On) gates all reminder delivery. Below it, individual toggles control each notification type — all default to On:

Plan created · Plan completed · Form reminders · Document reminders · Checkpoint reminders · Overdue alerts · Weekly digest · Document verification · Mentor assignment · Buddy assignment · Task group assignment.

Reminder timing for forms and documents uses four triggers per type: 7 days before (default Off), 3 days before (default On), on the due date (default On), daily once overdue (default Off). The default schedule is low-noise — a 3-day heads-up and a due-date nudge.

Integrations

Setting	Default	What it changes
Forms app integration	On	Allows pulling Forms app templates into onboarding plans as enrollment forms.
Tasks app integration	On	Keeps onboarding-task status in sync with the Tasks app.
Preferred e-signature provider	None (tenant default)	Sets the default provider for document signing — native, DocuSign, HelloSign, Adobe Sign, or PandaDoc.

6. More help

• Onboarding Hub FAQ — specific setup and operating questions.
• Ask AI — the assistant answers questions about Onboarding Hub from these articles.