Last Updated on August 26, 2021 by Jan Bachelor
What are we trying to achieve with automated on-boarding?
In an small to medium business environment, your HR and IT teams may not have tools that help with workflows for new hires / leavers in the organization. Often, there is a long email chain between the Hiring Manager (HM), the HR Manager and IT, each side needing other type of information (access levels, start dates, hardware to be provided, seating arrangement, etc.).
From the point of view of the IT team, it is frustrating when HR or the HM do not provide the necessary details to streamline account creation and assigned access or required equipment. Often, they start asking for things only after the new hire starts. Let’s automate it all and then train each party on how to use the new tool!
Infrastructure (back-bone)
In this guide, we assume that the following software is or can be used for the automated on-boarding:
- Okta (SSO / authentication platform)
- Google Workspace (for file sharing and for scheduling calendar notifications)
- WordPress (an instance of WP can be spinned up on a VM on-premises or in the cloud)
Paid software licenses (or plugins)
- Gravity Forms & Gravity Flow – for online forms and workflow steps.
- GF Populate Anything – to dynamically populate a drop-down list of managers to whom will the new hire report to from the organization that are loaded as WordPress users. This is optional and there is a suggested free work-around with dynamically loaded Google spreadsheet items – however, this will require some guided scripting (see next step).
- Integromat – for automating workflows outside of WordPress – we would need the $9 monthly basic license.
- Gravity Flow Outgoing Webhook – to send out workflow from Gravity Flow (WordPress) to Integromat.
- Gravity Flow Incoming Webhook – to receive data from Integromat back to Gravity Flow (WordPress).
- Gravity View – optional for creating easy-to-navigate reports for HR (useful for higher volume of new hires).
- Gravity Tool Tips – optional for passing instructions to users when filling the form in
Free software (or plugins)
For some functionality, free plugins can be used. Namely:
- WP Easy SMTP – to send emails out for notifications.
- Google Drive Embedder – to display the check list inside the Gravity form – free license is sufficient.
- Members plugin – to define teams in your WordPress installation to assign workflows to them rather than to individuals (this is a safer but optional approach).