Employee Onboarding
The new finance analyst at Harbourview Clinic arrived at nine and was shown to a desk that had a chair and a view. She spent the first morning reading the staff handbook on her phone. There was no laptop, no account, and nobody had told IT she existed. HR had known for five weeks. The hiring manager had known for six. The desk found out at 9:20, from the analyst, who was polite about it, which somehow made it worse. By lunchtime she had a loaner with someone else's wallpaper and an account with no access to anything she had been hired to do. The desk had spent three hours on a ticket that should have taken one, spread calmly across the previous fortnight.
This series is about making day one boring. It covers onboarding as a ticket type rather than a surprise, with a trigger, a form and a parent ticket. That ticket's child tasks go to each team. The series covers the day-one checklist and the dependencies that set its order. Then come role profiles and standard kits, so most starters are a profile rather than a project. It covers lead time: the agreement with HR that gets the request to the desk before the start date. That includes what to do when the request does not reach the desk before the start date. It covers first-week support for new starters, which is where the desk earns a reputation it will keep for years. And it covers measuring and improving onboarding, because an on-time rate is a number HR will actually look at.
Articles in This Series
- Onboarding as a Ticket Type, Not a Surprise
Why onboarding arrives as a surprise, the trigger moment, who raises it, and what the request must contain. Also covers the parent ticket with its linked tasks for each team, and the request form fields. - The Day-One Checklist: What Must Be Ready, in What Order
Accounts, hardware, access, mail, phone, badge and desk; the order and the dependencies. Also covers what ready means and who signs it off, and the checklist itself. - Role Profiles and Standard Kits: Most Starters Are Not a Project
The handful of profiles that cover most starters, and the standard kit and the standard access bundle per role with approvals pre-agreed. Also covers the exception path, and the role profile card. - Lead Time: Getting the Request Before the Start Date
Working with HR and hiring managers, the ten-working-day ask, and what the desk does when it gets two days. Also covers what late notice costs, measuring lead time, and the agreement with HR. - First-Week Support for New Starters, From Welcome Note to Day Three
The welcome note from IT, the five-minute how-to-ask-for-help briefing, the day-three check-in, the common first-week tickets headed off early, and the welcome message. - Measuring and Improving Onboarding: On-Time Rate and Defects
On-time rate, defects per starter, the retrospective after a bad one, the quarterly review with HR, the two-week starter survey, and the onboarding scorecard.
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This series is part of the QuerySolv helpdesk topic library. It covers the foundations, processes, communication, knowledge, tooling, metrics, classic ticket domains, people and strategy behind a support desk that works. The library pairs well with the software we build: QuerySolv. It is a self-hosted help desk that runs as one Windows service on your own network. It is licensed once per installation, not per agent per month.