New Hire Onboarding: Fifteen Steps in One Place Instead of Four
- Status
- 13 tests · built June 2026 · pilot, running locally
- Stack
- Next.js
New hires dashboard — one card per hire, with days to start and percent complete.
01 — The problem
Onboarding is the most predictable work a People team does and the easiest to drop, because none of it happens in one place — offer paperwork with HR, a laptop with IT, a Day 1 calendar with the manager — held together only by whoever remembers to check.
02 — What it does
A dashboard shows one card per hire — role, manager, days to or since start, current phase, percent complete. Opening a hire reveals the full fifteen-step checklist grouped by phase, from pre-start through day ninety, each task with an owner and a due date. The new hire sees only their own checklist, with no visibility into anyone else's onboarding.
03 — Design & technical approach
Every task's due date is computed as an offset from the hire's actual start date rather than a fixed calendar day, so a single template works regardless of when someone starts. That design surfaced a real bug: a date parsed at UTC midnight rendered a day early for anyone west of Greenwich, making Day 1 look like Day 2. Fixing the date logic once, in a single shared function instead of the fifteen places it had been duplicated, is what made the tool trustworthy enough to rely on.
04 — Outcome & impact
Every task's due date is an offset from the start date rather than a fixed day, so one template works for every hire regardless of when they begin — and it surfaced a real bug: a date parsed at UTC midnight rendered a day early for anyone west of Greenwich, making Day 1 look like Day 2. Fixing it in one shared function instead of fifteen scattered ones is what actually made the tool trustworthy.
Every screen, explained
A closer look at each part of the app, in the order you'd actually move through it.