Guide to creating an onboarding template

Investing time in creating an onboarding template for your business will ensure you and your managers can quickly set up a seamless onboarding experience for your new employees.

How templates work

Onboarding templates are sets of tasks and documents that you should re-use for multiple employees, so they won’t refer to a particular person at this stage.

As an owner or manager with the onboarding permission, start with the best-practice onboarding template in ‘My Business’ that comes pre-populated with a range of tasks to help you get going quickly. Duplicate it and then add your own company policies, welcome video links, and define which roles will own which tasks.

Create templates to cover different departments, locations, or roles by defining the tasks and documents that are common to a particular situation.

A template will become an onboarding plan once you assign it to a new employee, so be sure the tasks start from the acceptance of an employment offer.

Once you’ve set up your template, you’ll assign it to a specific person (the template will become a plan) and apply completion dates to the various sections. You can assign people to the roles you have set up in your template and add any tasks specific to your new hire.

Welcome message

When you set up your template, you’re prompted to provide a welcome message. Draft a generic message that is applicable to all employees.

The welcome message becomes part of the onboarding plan once it is assigned to a specific person and is also sent in the notification email when the plan becomes available to them. The welcome message will also include a heading which will automatically include the employee’s first name, eg. “Welcome John”, once the plan is available.

Sections and dates

Sections are a group of tasks relating to a time period, eg. day one, week one. In your template, you’ll have the ability to set the name of sections, the date when tasks are due, and a description of the section.

You can add a new section by selecting ‘Add section’, at the end of your template or draft plan. Your new section will be ordered by date and you can drag and drop tasks into it from other sections, if needed.

Reminders will be sent to the employee a week before the section’s due date.

Adding tasks to an onboarding template

Once you have duplicated our best-practice template, remove the tasks you don’t need and update the details with details relevant to your own business.

Task library

As well as the best-practice template, we have a library of tasks that you can search, and then simply add to your template to cover compliance, culture, and training-related induction tasks.

Assigning roles to a task

When you’re creating a task, you’ll be able to select a role, e.g. the new hire or manager, for each task. This means you can define the type of person who will usually own the task and once you create a plan from the template, you will be prompted to select the specific person for that role, who will then be assigned the task to complete.

Three roles are populated automatically: new hire, buddy, and manager, and you can also add your own roles to your template to cover the range of tasks specific to your business.

Task category

Task categories ensure your reminders display in the right place and allow you to report on and track task completion across your organisation.

When you’re creating a task, you have the opportunity to select a category for that task, eg. ‘compliance’ or ‘asset’. You can then report on the completion of tasks for that category across all your employees to assess your level of compliance or to keep track of what assets were assigned during your employees’ onboarding process.

Adding documents to an onboarding template

Documents to accept

If you have documents that you want all employees to read and accept as part of starting their employment, e.g. the company handbook or code of conduct, you can upload these documents to MyHR and then add them to the onboarding template. On creating a plan, your new hire will be automatically tasked with digitally accepting the document, automating the distribution and tracking of key materials.

Forms and information

You can attach a document to a task for reference. This document will be available to download for anyone who has access to the plan or the reminder associated with the task.

Starting a plan

While an onboarding template is not specific to an employee, an onboarding plan is.

Once you’ve finalised your template and added your new employee to MyHR, you can assign the template to them to create a draft onboarding plan. You will then assign roles, customise the plan for that employee (if needed), and publish it.

Once it is published and your new employee is activated in MyHR, they will be able to view the plan and start on their onboarding tasks. People who have tasks assigned to them will have reminders in MyHR, and the new hire and manager will be alerted by email about the onboarding plan.