Onboard a new employee without forgetting anything

The problem

Onboarding is a process every business runs rarely and therefore never gets good at. Somebody starts, and the first week is assembled live: an account is missing, the person who explains the system is on holiday, and the new hire spends three days waiting to be useful while feeling like an interruption.

The cost is not just the slow start. It is the impression. The first week is when someone decides whether this is a business that has its act together, and improvisation is visible from the inside immediately.

It also repeats. The same twenty questions come up with every hire, and each time someone answers them verbally, which means the answers are never written down, which guarantees the next person asks again.

What AI can actually do here

Very little of the value here is AI, and the parts that are, are conveniences rather than the point.

The core is a checklist that runs itself: a template of everything a new person needs, triggered on a start date, assigned to the people responsible. Equipment ordered, accounts created, first-week meetings booked, paperwork collected before day one rather than during it.

The document layer is where the repeated questions go to die. Written once, updated when wrong, linked from the checklist so it is found rather than remembered.

Video is the underrated piece. A three-minute screen recording of how a system actually works is faster to make than a written guide and considerably more useful for anything with a user interface. Record it once while doing the task, and it answers the question permanently. AI transcripts and summaries make those recordings searchable, which is what stops a video library becoming a graveyard.

Where a model genuinely helps: turning a recording into written steps, so you get both formats from one effort.

How the tools differ

BambooHR is the HR system of record and handles onboarding as part of employee data, time off and performance. No free plan: Core is $10 per employee per month, Pro $17, Elite $25, and companies with 25 or fewer employees pay a flat rate starting at $250 per month. That flat rate is the number that decides it for a small business, since below roughly 25 people the per-employee framing does not apply.

Notion is the low-cost route and often the right one under ten people. Free for individuals, EUR 9.50 per seat per month on Plus, EUR 19.50 on Business. A single onboarding page with a checklist and links covers most of the need, and it lives where your other documentation is.

Loom is for the walkthroughs. Starter is free with 25 videos per person, 5 minute recordings and transcriptions in over 50 languages at up to 720p. Business is $18 per user per month billed annually with unlimited videos and length, and Business plus AI is $24 adding auto titles, summaries, chapters and filler word removal. The free tier is genuinely usable for a small library.

When you don't need a tool

If you hire once every two years, write a document and keep it updated. A checklist in a shared doc costs nothing and does most of the work.

If your onboarding problem is really a management problem, that the new person has no clear first task, no system fixes it. The checklist gets them equipped, not useful.

For the recruiting stage that comes before this, see fill one open role without paying recruiter fees, and for the ongoing admin afterwards, run HR admin without an HR department.