Employee Onboarding & Offboarding - Quick Start Tips

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.

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:

1. Navigate to Settings > People > Employee Profile Customisation to enable/disable standard onboarding fields
2. Use the "Use in Onboarding Process" checkbox to capture details like Certifications, Medical Disclosure Statement, etc. that will be stored on the Employee File
3. 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.

Guides:

• Customise onboarding and employee file fields
• Create and manage custom fields and additional information

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
• Shared task - Any one owner can complete this task on behalf of all others
• 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:

• Setting up onboarding checklists

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:

• Set up offboarding checklists
• Offboard and terminate an employee

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:

1. Create groups in Settings Groups (e.g., "Sales Team", "Melbourne Office", "Managers")
2. Assign group-specific checklists by selecting the group when creating onboarding checklists
3. Share policies, induction content and certifications to specific groups
4. When onboarding, assign the employee to relevant groups in their Employment Details
5. 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:

• Create and assign a group

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