Available for the following payroll plans: Employment Lite, Employment Plus, Employment Unlimited Available for the following HR classic plans: Standard, Premium, Platinum
Available for the following user access levels: Admin
Employee Onboarding and Offboarding in Employment Hero helps you create consistent, compliant, and engaging experiences for employees joining or leaving your organisation. Automate checklists, customise profile requirements, and use groups to deliver targeted content so every employee gets exactly what they need.
This article explains the following:
- Why use Employee Onboarding & Offboarding?
- Getting started with Employee Onboarding & Offboarding
- Pro tips to maximise value
- Related features
Why use Employee Onboarding & Offboarding?
Turn complex onboarding and offboarding into simple, automated workflows. Create comprehensive checklists once, then let Employment Hero handle task distribution, due dates, and reminders automatically so your team focuses on people, not paperwork.
Automated checklists mean critical tasks never fall through the cracks. From IT equipment setup to final access removal, every stakeholder knows exactly what they need to do and when. Tasks trigger based on start and end dates.
Once you've set up Groups (i.e. 'Sales Team', 'Front of House', 'Melbourne Office' etc.) you can automatically assign the relevant Policies and Induction Content, or trigger Checklists when you Onboard or Offboard employees belonging to those Groups.
Quick Launch Video
Getting started with Employee Onboarding & Offboarding
Customise which sections appear in the employee profile and choose what information employees must complete during onboarding. This includes standard fields like Medical Disclosure Statement, and Certifications.
How it works:
- Navigate to Settings > People > Employee Profile Customisation to enable/disable standard onboarding fields
- Use the "Use in Onboarding Process" checkbox to capture details like Certifications, Medical Disclosure Statement, etc. that will be stored on the Employee File
- Additional Information: If there's a data field you wish to capture during Onboarding to be stored on their Employee File i.e. "Food allergies", "Uniform size", "Preferred drink" this can be done via Settings > People > Additional Information.
Important
The option to capture Additional Information is currently only available on the following tiers, HR Platinum, EH Plus, EH Unlimited.
Guides:
- Customise onboarding and employee file fields
- Create and manage custom fields and additional information
Helpful Hint
Only enable fields that are truly essential. Too many required fields can slow down onboarding. You can always collect additional information later through the employee file.
Build automated checklists that trigger when you onboard a new employee. Break down your onboarding process into clear tasks with owners, due dates, and subtasks.
What to include in each task:
- Task name and description - Be clear and specific about what needs to be done
- Task owner - Choose from administrators, the employee's manager, the employee themselves, specific individuals by name, or external email addresses
- Due date - Set relative to start date (e.g., "2 days before start date", "On day 1", "7 days after start date")
- Subtasks - Add detailed steps within each task
Who to assign checklists to:
- All employees
- Specific groups (e.g., Sales Team, Melbourne Office) (see Step 4 on how to create Groups)
Guides:
Build systematic offboarding checklists to ensure smooth employee exits, protect company data, and maintain compliance.
Critical offboarding tasks typically include:
- Equipment return (laptop, phone, access cards, company assets)
- System access removal (email, software, building access)
- Knowledge transfer and documentation
- Final approvals (leave requests, expense claims, timesheets)
- Exit interview scheduling
- Final payroll processing
How it works:
- Similar to onboarding, assign tasks to administrators, managers, the employee or specific individuals
- Set due dates relative to termination date
- Offboarding tasks trigger when you enter a termination date for an employee and the task owners will receive an email notification
Guides:
Helpful Hint
Create different offboarding checklists for different scenarios using groups which will allow different tasks to trigger dependent on the group. For example, an onsite worker would need to return an access card but a remote worker would not need this task.
Groups (formerly called Teams) allow you to organise employees and automatically deliver targeted content, policies, and checklists based on their role, location, or department. When you assign a new employee to groups during onboarding, they automatically receive everything associated with those groups.
How groups work:
- Create groups in Settings Groups (e.g., "Sales Team", "Melbourne Office", "Managers")
- Assign group-specific checklists by selecting the group when creating onboarding checklists
- Share policies, induction content and certifications to specific groups
- When onboarding, assign the employee to relevant groups in their Employment Details
- All group-specific content automatically applies
Use cases:
- Department-specific training - Sales team gets sales resources, finance team gets finance policies
- Location-specific induction - Melbourne employees get Melbourne office info, Sydney employees get Sydney info
- Role-specific requirements - Managers get leadership policies and induction content automatically
- Certification requirements - Forklift operators automatically assigned forklift certification requirements
Guides:
Important
Employees can belong to multiple groups. Someone could be in both "Sales Team" and "Melbourne Office" groups to receive content from both. Keep your group structure simple and logical - too many groups creates confusion.
Important
This feature is only available on our Platinum HR Classic, Employment Plus or Employment Unlimited subscriptions.
Don't have access to Workflows? Click here to organise a time with one of our friendly platform specialists to get a better understanding of your requirements.
Automate repetitive tasks using "when-if-then" logic. For example:
- When an employee completes onboarding setup
- If they're in the Sales Team
- Then create their Google Workspace account, trigger sales onboarding checklist, and assign sales policies
What you can automate:
- Trigger specific onboarding checklists based on conditions
- Create Google Workspace accounts
- Create Microsoft 365 accounts
- Add employee to a probation review
- Automatically assign policies to new employees
- Automatically assign certifications
- Create 1:1 meetings between new hire and manager
- Create custom tasks
Use cases:
- Advanced triggers - automations without workflows, would require you to use groups which would act as a trigger. Workflows allow for advanced triggers such as job title, start date, cost centre or even employment type.
- Notifications - you could utilise workflows to set up workflows that will notify a recipient when an employee completes certain processes such as policy acknowledgement or completion of induction content.
- Probation reviews - use workflows to automatically add a new hire to a probation review.
Guides:
- Configure my organisation's onboarding workflows
- Automate a probation review
- Automatically create a 1:1 when a new employee is onboarded
- Available workflow templates
Helpful Hint
Start with simple, pre-built workflow templates like "Assign policies after onboarding" before building complex custom workflows. The Quick Setup templates get you up and running in minutes.
Pro tips to maximise value
- Build progressively, not perfectly - Start with a basic checklist covering day 1 essentials. Review and add tasks as you refine your process. A simple checklist that gets used beats a perfect one that doesn't.
- Use groups strategically for scale - Rather than manually customising each onboarding, create 3-5 key groups (by department, location, or role) and let automation handle the assigning of tasks and key requirements. This gives you customised onboarding without the manual work.
- Distribute task ownership wisely - Don't default everything to HR. Assign IT tasks to IT, workspace setup to facilities, system training to team leads. This distributes the work and gets new hires connected to key people.
- Set realistic due dates - Not every task needs to happen on day 1. Spread tasks across the first week and month. This prevents overwhelming both the new hire and your team on the first day.
- Make onboarding two-way - encourage new hires to share information about themselves, their work style, or their questions. This creates engagement and helps managers prepare for meaningful conversations. Clients on our HR Classic Platinum or Employment Unlimited plans can utilise the 1:1 feature for this.
- Plan for exceptions - For urgent hires, terminations or unusual situations where the employee is either onboarded or terminated with immediate effect, note that tasks will still trigger but the due dates will be backdated if they are due before the employees start/end date.
- Review quarterly - Block 30 minutes each quarter to review your checklists. What tasks are consistently delayed? What new systems need to be added? Keep your process current as your organisation evolves.
- Use offboarding as a learning opportunity - Track common issues that arise during offboarding (forgotten equipment, undocumented processes). Use these insights to improve your onboarding and operational processes.
Related features
Once you've got Employee Onboarding & Offboarding running smoothly, explore these features to build an even stronger employee experience:
- Policies and Documents - Automatically assign company policies to new hires based on their groups and track acknowledgments for compliance. Policies can be shared to specific groups, employment types, or locations.
- Custom Security Settings - Grant managers custom access to onboard their own team members, giving them ownership of the onboarding experience while maintaining appropriate controls.
- Performance Reviews - Schedule 30/60/90 day check-ins as part of your onboarding workflow (Platinum HR) to ensure new hires are settling in successfully.
- Employee File Customisation - Customise what information you collect during onboarding with Additional Information fields to capture organisation-specific data like parking spot numbers, dietary requirements, or equipment preferences.