People & HR

How to onboard a new hire as Small HR Teams

People & HRFor Small HR Teams4 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Your two-person HR team onboards maybe 3-5 new hires a month, and every single one is a fire drill. You're manually emailing IT for laptop setup, reminding managers to complete their 30-day check-ins, chasing payroll to confirm Paylocity enrollment, and hoping someone updated the Notion onboarding doc after the last reorg. Greenhouse tells you the offer was accepted; nothing else talks to anything else. The new hire shows up Day 1 and half the checklist lives in your head. You spend roughly 4-6 hours per hire on coordination that isn't HR work — it's just stitching together systems that refuse to talk.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Small HR Teams4 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

An onboarding tracker app that pulls from Paylocity (scheduled sync) and your ATS, shows every new hire's status, outstanding tasks, and manager check-in completion in one place — no spreadsheet required

Automated Day 1, Day 30, and Day 90 email sequences that draft and send from Gmail so you're not writing the same 'welcome to the team' message for the fifteenth time

A searchable onboarding knowledge base that new hires can actually use to answer their own benefits and policy questions, so you stop being the human FAQ

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Knowledge Management Email Agent Scheduling Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — employees, payroll enrollment status, and org units feed the onboarding tracker automatically. Gmail is connected as a scheduled-sync provider so the email agent reads sent history and drafts outbound messages. Notion is connected as a scheduled-sync provider to keep the knowledge base current with your existing docs. Greenhouse, BambooHR, Rippling, and Gusto are available from Starch's integration catalog and queried live when the tracker needs ATS status or HRIS data. For any HR vendor portal that doesn't have an API — benefits carrier sites, background check portals — Starch automates those through your browser, no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a new hire onboarding tracker that shows each person's name, start date, department, manager, and a checklist of onboarding tasks (laptop provisioned, Paylocity enrolled, Slack added, first 1:1 scheduled, 30-day check-in completed). Pull active employees from Paylocity and let me update task status manually or by checking boxes.

Set up an onboarding email sequence: send a Day 0 welcome email from my Gmail with first-day logistics, a Day 3 check-in asking how things are going, a Day 30 prompt to the manager asking them to complete the 30-day review form, and a Day 90 milestone note to the employee. Draft each email so I can review before it sends.

Build me an onboarding knowledge base in Notion that indexes our benefits guide, PTO policy, IT setup instructions, and employee handbook. When a new hire asks a question in the Starch chat, pull the answer from those docs and cite the source.

Create a task list for each new hire onboarding with P1 tasks (Day 1 must-haves), P2 tasks (first week), and P3 tasks (first month). Alert me if any P1 task is incomplete by 5pm on the new hire's start date.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch pulls employees, hire dates, org units, and payroll enrollment status on a daily refresh — this becomes the source of truth for who is actually onboarding.

2 Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider so the Email Agent can read your existing onboarding email templates, track what's been sent to which new hire, and draft the next message in the sequence.

3 Connect Notion as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch indexes your existing onboarding docs — benefits guide, IT setup, PTO policy, handbook — so new hires can search them through the Knowledge Management app.

4 Open the Knowledge Management app and tell Starch: 'Build an onboarding knowledge base from our Notion pages tagged onboarding. Surface answers to benefits, PTO, and IT questions in a chat interface new hires can use.' Customize the categories to match your actual doc structure.

5 Build the onboarding tracker app by describing what you want: 'Show me every employee with a start date in the last 90 days, their manager, department, Paylocity enrollment status, and a task checklist. Let me mark tasks complete and add notes.' Starch assembles the app from your Paylocity sync data.

6 Connect Greenhouse or your ATS from Starch's integration catalog (queried live) so the tracker also shows offer letter sent date and start date pulled directly from the ATS — no manual data entry when a new hire converts.

7 Set up the email sequence automation: tell Starch 'When a new employee appears in Paylocity with a start date in the future, draft a Day 0 welcome email, a Day 3 check-in, a Day 30 manager prompt, and a Day 90 milestone email. Queue them for my review 24 hours before each send date.'

8 Configure the Task Manager app for onboarding: 'Create a standard onboarding task list — P1: laptop provisioned, Paylocity enrolled, Slack added; P2: 1:1 with manager scheduled, team intro done; P3: 30-day check-in completed, 90-day goals set. Alert me by Slack if any P1 task is open at 5pm on start date.'

9 Use the Scheduling app to create a bookable 'New Hire Orientation' meeting type — 30 minutes, synced to your Google Calendar, with a link you drop into every Day 0 welcome email automatically. No back-and-forth on when to meet.

10 Set a weekly automation: 'Every Monday at 8am, pull this week's new hires from the onboarding tracker, check which tasks are incomplete, and Slack me a summary with names, outstanding P1 and P2 items, and manager names.' This replaces your Monday morning spreadsheet review.

11 For background check portals or benefits carrier sites with no API, set up browser automations to check status: 'Go to [carrier portal], log in, pull enrollment confirmation for employees hired in the last 30 days, and update the onboarding tracker with their enrollment status.' Starch handles this through your browser — no API needed.

12 After the first hire runs through the full flow, tell Starch to identify gaps: 'Compare the onboarding task completion dates for our last 5 hires. Which tasks consistently run late? Which managers have the lowest check-in completion rates?' Use this to tighten the process.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

Jamie Chen's Onboarding — April 2026 (Marketing Manager, Start Date April 14)

Sample numbers from a real run

Paylocity sync detects Jamie's record	0
Day 0 welcome email drafted and queued for review	0
Onboarding task checklist auto-created with 11 items (3 P1, 5 P2, 3 P3)	0
Orientation call booked via Scheduling link (April 14, 10am)	0
IT provisioning task flagged incomplete at 4:45pm Day 1 — Slack alert fired	0
Day 30 manager prompt sent to Jamie's manager on May 14	0
Benefits enrollment confirmed via browser automation on carrier portal	0

Jamie's offer closes in Greenhouse on April 10. Starch detects a new Paylocity record with a start date of April 14 — that triggers the sequence. By April 13, you have a Day 0 welcome email drafted, reviewed, and queued; an onboarding checklist with 11 tasks built and assigned; and a Scheduling link included in the welcome email so Jamie can book her own orientation call. April 14 arrives: laptop provisioning (a P1 task) is still unchecked at 4:45pm — Starch fires a Slack alert to you and the IT manager. You forward it; the laptop gets sorted by end of day. Benefits enrollment doesn't have an API, so on April 15 Starch logs into the carrier portal through your browser, confirms Jamie's enrollment is active, and marks that task complete in the tracker automatically. On May 14, exactly 30 days in, Jamie's manager gets an automated email: 'Jamie's 30-day check-in is due this week — here's the form.' You didn't have to remember to send it. Total active HR time on Jamie's onboarding: about 45 minutes, versus the 5+ hours the previous hire took.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Onboarding task completion rate by Day 7 (target: 100% of P1 tasks done by end of Day 1, 80% of P2 tasks by Day 7)

Time-to-productivity proxy: 30-day check-in completion rate by manager (are managers actually doing the check-ins on time?)

HR hours per new hire onboarded (target: under 2 active hours, excluding automated steps)

New hire self-service rate: percentage of onboarding questions answered by the knowledge base without HR intervention

Benefits enrollment confirmation lag: days between start date and confirmed enrollment in carrier system

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Rippling or BambooHR onboarding module

Covers HRIS-native tasks well but doesn't connect to your ATS, Gmail sequences, or Notion knowledge base — you still stitch the middle manually.

Notion + manual checklists

Flexible but entirely manual — someone has to copy the template, assign it, and chase completion; nothing alerts you when a task slips.

Greenhouse onboarding

Lives inside the ATS, which is great pre-Day 1, but it doesn't know about Paylocity enrollment status, IT provisioning, or Day 30 manager check-ins.

Zapier + Google Sheets

Can automate discrete triggers (offer accepted → create row) but building a multi-step onboarding sequence with conditional logic and multiple data sources requires significant setup time and breaks when any one system changes.

Dedicated onboarding platforms (Workbright, Enboarder)

Purpose-built for onboarding but another standalone SaaS subscription that still doesn't talk to your payroll system without custom integration work — and can't be repurposed for your review cycles or headcount modeling.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, email agent, scheduling all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We use Rippling as our HRIS, not Paylocity or ADP. Can Starch still pull employee data?

Yes. Rippling is available from Starch's integration catalog — connect it and the agent queries your employee and org data live when your onboarding tracker or automations need it. It's not a scheduled sync like Paylocity, so it queries in real time rather than storing a local copy, but for onboarding workflows that's typically fine.

Can Starch actually send the onboarding emails, or does it just draft them?

Both modes work. You can configure the Email Agent to queue drafts in Gmail for your review before sending — which most HR teams prefer for anything going to new hires — or set it to auto-send on a schedule for lower-stakes messages like manager check-in reminders. You decide the approval flow per email type.

What about the employee-facing onboarding portal? Does Starch give the new hire their own login?

Starch builds apps for your internal HR team, not a new-hire-facing portal product. The Knowledge Management app gives new hires a searchable FAQ they can access, and you can share a Starch app link with them, but it's not a white-labeled HRIS onboarding experience. If you need a dedicated employee portal, your HRIS's onboarding module is still the right tool for that slice — Starch handles everything around it.

Our benefits carrier portal has no API. Can Starch really check enrollment status there?

Yes — this is one of Starch's genuine differentiators. Starch can log into any website you can log into and navigate through your browser, no API required. It runs an independent browser session, pulls the enrollment data, and writes it back to your onboarding tracker. You set this up once by describing what you want and Starch handles it on whatever schedule you choose.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have to be careful about what we connect to HR data.

Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified — that's an honest limit worth naming. If your company requires SOC 2 certification for any system touching employee data, that's a blocker today. It's on the roadmap. For teams where SOC 2 isn't a hard requirement, Starch uses OAuth for all connections and doesn't store credentials.

Can Starch replace our HRIS (Paylocity, BambooHR, Rippling)?

No, and it's not trying to. Your HRIS handles payroll runs, compliance, benefits administration, and the official employee record — none of that changes. Starch connects to your HRIS and builds the workflow surfaces your HRIS doesn't cover: the onboarding tracker, the automated email sequences, the manager check-in reminders, the knowledge base your new hires actually search. Think of it as the connective tissue between the systems you already have.

How long does it take to set up the onboarding workflow described here?

For a team that already has Paylocity connected and a Notion doc with their policies, the core onboarding tracker and email sequence can be running in an afternoon. The Knowledge Management app takes longer if your docs are scattered — getting them into Notion first is the real work. The browser automations for carrier portals typically take 30-60 minutes to configure per portal. Nothing requires code.