Lisa starts her new job today. She’s been looking forward to it — new company, new colleagues, a fresh start. But the moment she walks through the door, it’s obvious: nothing is ready for her.
No desk, no laptop, no email account. So instead of getting stuck in, she spends her first morning asking around. Her manager first, then HR, then IT. One person says it’s probably all been requested; another suspects it hasn’t.
By lunchtime she has told the same story three times, waited on two different people, and still can’t do her job. Worse, she’s starting to feel like a nuisance.
We see this again and again with our clients.
HR takes the blame — unfairly
In most organisations, onboarding is your responsibility as the HR manager.
Fair enough, on paper. In practice, though, most of the actual work happens well outside your control.
IT creates the accounts, operations signs off on access, and finance makes sure everyone gets paid — which means the new hire has to be set up in the accounting package and the payroll system too. Miss that, and there’s no telling whether the payslip will be right or the first salary will arrive on time.
You’re expected to coordinate the whole thing, yet you can’t actually do most of it yourself.
So you track progress somewhere, check and re-check whether everything has been picked up, and chase people when it hasn’t. The mental load is entirely yours; the outcome mostly isn’t.
Which tells you what onboarding really is in most companies: not a well-run process, but a loose collection of steps scattered across departments. Everyone does their bit, nobody owns the whole. It runs on manual actions and handovers — and when that chain breaks, as it almost always does, you’re the one who gets the blame.
While onboarding is manual work, it will keep failing
Many organisations have built their own version of this process. Some quite tidily, in fact.
There’s a checklist. There are agreements. Parts may even be automated in the HR system. And still it keeps going wrong, because none of that touches the root cause: onboarding is still manual work. What happens to Lisa isn’t bad luck — it’s the predictable result of how onboarding is usually set up.
The moment you depend on people passing tasks between departments, things slip. Tasks stall, information gets lost, and every exception adds complexity.
And nobody sees the whole picture. Everyone watches their own corner. So onboarding never runs on its own — it has to be managed, constantly.
The real damage shows up later
A new hire losing their first day is annoying. It’s also the least of it.
Because the process is manual, your time goes on arranging, checking and chasing. A proper induction — actually welcoming someone into the company — rarely gets the attention it deserves.
A messy start sticks, too. New people begin with the sense that things aren’t in order, and that impression is hard to undo. We regularly see employees leave within months even though the job itself is fine. Trace it back, and it began with how they began.
Most importantly, you never get round to what HR is actually for: looking after the culture, helping people land well, making them feel part of the organisation. When that keeps falling by the wayside, it shows — in how teams work together, how new people connect, and eventually in how the whole organisation performs.
Your core HR system won’t fix this
You may well have tried to solve this inside the HR system. But the problem doesn’t live inside any one system — it lives between them, and between departments: at every handover, every passed-on task, every dependency.
Until that layer is properly organised, onboarding will keep relying on people rather than on a structure that does the work for them. And the same goes in reverse when someone leaves: accounts stay active, licences keep running, access isn’t revoked on time. That’s a real risk, not just an inconvenience.
How do you know the problem is structural?
One simple test: look at your operational meetings.
If onboarding keeps appearing on the agenda, you’re treating symptoms — losing hours to waiting, aligning and double-checking, none of which should be necessary.
What actually fixes onboarding
Better alignment or tighter management won’t get you there. What fixes it is automating the process itself: every action carried out at the right moment, across systems, with no one having to chase it.
- Tasks are followed up automatically, with reminders when something stalls
- Dependencies fade into the background
- The process keeps moving without anyone watching over it
There will always be the odd exception, but the bulk simply runs. Which is exactly what it takes to make sure the next Lisa can just sit down and start.
As long as your onboarding relies on people, this will keep happening. It only stops once the process does the work.
Want your on- and offboarding simply handled? Here’s how we do it.
