Employee onboarding

A preview of how this template lays out — the boards, their custom workflow states, and where the sample issues land. WIP caps show a badge.

• New hire: Senior Engineer — full onboarding

  Parent issue; sub-issues cover accounts, hardware, buddy, and 30/60/90 goals.

  P15pt

• Provision accounts and hardware before day one

  • it
  P12pt

• Assign an onboarding buddy

  P21pt

These rules aren't created when you apply the template — they're recipes you can wire up in Settings → Automations once your board exists.

• When

  Hire enters 'Pre-start'

  Then

  Generate the standard onboarding checklist as sub-issues

• When

  Sub-issue labeled 'it'

  Then

  Route to the IT helpdesk board for provisioning

Pre-start is a column, and that is the whole thesis. The single most common onboarding failure is entirely mechanical: a new hire arrives on Monday and cannot log in, because provisioning started the morning they did. Making pre-start a state with its own work — and routing the IT sub-issues out to whoever owns provisioning — moves that work before day one, where it belongs. The 30/60/90 column is the second half: it is there because onboarding attention reliably collapses at the end of week one.

1. 1.Open the card at signature, not at start date

   The moment an offer is accepted, create the hire's card in Pre-start. Everything with a lead time — hardware, accounts, a desk, a payroll record, a background check — starts its clock from there. Two weeks of lead time is the difference between a working day one and a new hire watching someone else install things.

2. 2.Expand the standard checklist as sub-issues

   Every hire gets the same base set, with role-specific additions layered on. The value is not the list itself but that it is identical every time — the tenth hire gets the ramp the first one got, which is exactly what stops happening when onboarding lives in a manager's head. Update the base checklist whenever something is missed rather than fixing it once for one person.

3. 3.Route IT work to the people who own it

   Provisioning tasks carry an it label and go to the helpdesk queue rather than sitting on a people-ops board where IT will never look. The pattern generalises: onboarding is cross-functional, so the board coordinates, but each task should live where its owner already works.

4. 4.Assign a buddy who is not the manager

   The buddy answers the questions a new hire will not ask their manager — which of these meetings actually matter, who really decides this, is it normal that this is broken. Make it an explicit tracked assignment with a name on it, because an implicit buddy is nobody, and a manager cannot fill this role by definition.

5. 5.Make 30/60/90 goals concrete, and review them

   Write what done looks like at each mark — shipped a change, ran a meeting, owns an area — and put a calendar review against each. The column is worth nothing if the goals are only read at day ninety. Two of these three reviews are where you catch a ramp going wrong while it is still cheap.

This board encodes one opinion about how the work should run. Here is where that opinion is wrong and something else fits better.

• You have an HRIS that does this. BambooHR, Rippling, Workday and their peers run onboarding workflows tied to the employee record, payroll, benefits and device management. A parallel board means two checklists disagreeing, and the one in the HRIS is the one that legally matters.
• You are hiring at high volume with a standard ramp. Fifty warehouse or retail hires a month is a batch process, not fifty individual coordination projects, and the per-hire card becomes clerical work with no coordination payoff.
• The tasks involve sensitive personal data. Salary, immigration status, medical accommodations, background-check results — none of that belongs on a board most of the workspace can read. Keep those in the HR system with proper access control and let this board hold only the logistics.
• You hire two people a year. A document and a calendar reminder will genuinely serve you better than maintaining a board, and the board will be stale by the time you next need it.

Honest comparisons, including where the other tool wins. Planoda is pre-launch, so nothing below is a benchmark — it is a description of how each product approaches this job.

• BambooHR and other HRIS platforms

  An HRIS runs onboarding as part of the employee lifecycle: the record that holds payroll and benefits also holds the checklist, so nothing is duplicated and offboarding reverses it. This board is a coordination surface for the cross-functional work around that record, not a replacement for it.

  Where BambooHR and other HRIS platforms is better: If you have an HRIS, its onboarding module is the correct place for this and this board is redundant. Compliance documents, e-signature, tax forms and benefits enrolment are legally consequential and belong in the system of record.

• Notion

  The common Notion pattern is a per-hire page from a template, with the checklist as a to-do list and the handbook embedded alongside. It reads beautifully and it is a nice thing to hand a new person on day one. Where it falls down is that nothing routes: IT will not see the IT tasks unless someone tells them.

  Where Notion is better: For the hire-facing experience — a single welcoming page with everything they need, embedded docs, links, and a readable structure — Notion is clearly better than a set of cards. Many teams reasonably use both.

• ClickUp

  ClickUp does this with a task template that fires on a form submission, automations for role-based branches, and assignee rules per department. Functionally very similar to what is described here, with more configuration available and more configuration required.

  Where ClickUp is better: ClickUp's form-to-task automation is a cleaner intake than creating a card by hand, and its conditional automations handle role-specific branching without someone remembering to add the extra sub-issues.