Evolve your Employee Onboarding Process with Automation

Automated onboarding processes provide uniformity, time savings, and an enhanced welcome and retention experience for new employees, irrespective of their work environment, be it hybrid or remote.

Can automation streamline the onboarding of new employees?

We frequently receive inquiries about automating this process, which often involves numerous manual tasks. Before diving into automated onboarding, it’s beneficial to start with a set of standard questions to understand the specific requirements.

• Have you ever thought about the different steps involved when hiring a new employee?
• How many people does it take to get them truly onboard?
• Do you have one person to create the Active Directory Account (if on-prem)?
• Does the same person create the Office 365/M365 Account (Azure/Cloud)?
• Does the same person give access to all the network resources such as Teams, network shares, printers, VPN, etc?
• Does the same person join the workstation to the domain?
• Does the same person install all local applications?
• Does the same person have administrative access to all the following applications so they can add the new employee to any they need?
  • Amazon AWS
  • Azure DevOps
  • BMC Helix ITSM
  • Microsoft Azure AD
  • Microsoft 365
  • ServiceNow
  • Slack
  • VMWare vSphere

For most organizations the answer to the above questions is “Probably not.” 

These are all tasks typically assigned to several different people/teams who are responsible for their own specific area of administration.  For example, you may have the following teams or administrators:

• Domain Administrators
• Security Administrators
• Remote Access Administrators
• Office 365 Administrators
• Cloud Administrators
• VMWare vSphere Administrators
• Each software application often has its own administrative person/team as well for things like:
  • Salesforce
  • Citrix
  • Cisco Webex
  • Atlassian Jira
  • And the list goes on…

So how can employee onboarding automation help you make all of this happen more effectively and efficiently?

Some of these steps to onboard a new employee must be done in order/sequentially, while others can be done simultaneously without bothering any of these people to perform the administration. This is where automating employee onboarding can remove the pain of this manual process.

The Active Directory account (also known as (local/on-prem AD or Entra/Azure AD) can be created before the workstation has been built or even requisitioned.

However, access to other applications may not be able to be assigned to the employee until the Active Directory/Azure Active Directory is created because it might be tied to Active Directory for email or Single-Sign-On functionality.

But once the Active Directory/Azure Active Directory account has been created, all the other accounts can be created and tied to that account simultaneously.  All of this can be accomplished by automating the onboarding process.

Example of an employee onboarding process

Here is an example of an employee onboarding process as a possible workflow that could be improved for both accuracy and efficiency, allowing this new employee to be ready and able to have access to everything they need to do their job in less than a day, compared to up to two weeks if it were all to be done manually.

Note:  EVERYTHING in green can be automated and done with a single input form from the initial ‘New Hire Request’.

Everything in blue can be automated if you have systems in place for ordering.

Everything in red must be done by a person.

We have ready-to-deploy solutions for automating an onboarding process; check out our solution packs:

Starters, Movers, Leavers Automation for Azure Automation

Automation for New User Onboarding for System Center Orchestrator

Onboarding automation can reduce the total time required to complete onboarding new employees, reduce errors and free up the support teams who are performing this task today.

Email us if you would like further information or have any questions about automating your onboarding process.