Employee onboarding automation process: What it is + benefits

It doesn’t matter if it’s a CEO or a customer service rep—everyone has a first day at a new job. While that first day can be exciting for both employee and employer, businesses need to nail their employee onboarding to ensure the first day, week, month, and beyond go as smoothly as possible. The faster new hires get the information they need, the faster they can become that star employee human resources (HR) saw in the interview process.

Luckily, organisations can embrace employee onboarding automation to streamline the onboarding process. In this guide, we cover automated employee onboarding in detail, why it’s better than manual onboarding, and how you can use it to develop stellar new hires.

More in this guide:

• Manual onboarding vs. automated onboarding
• 5 methods to automate employee onboarding
• Benefits of an automated onboarding process
• Employee onboarding automation best practices
• Frequently asked questions
• Automate employee onboarding with Zendesk for HR

Manual onboarding vs. automated onboarding

Onboarding is crucial to integrating employees into an organisation and fostering employee engagement. The quicker you acclimatise new hires, the quicker they can become valuable contributors to your business. But you can’t just throw a few documents at them and hope they absorb knowledge. Instead, you need to develop a repeatable approach—and you can do this via manual onboarding or automated onboarding.

Manual onboarding usually involves new hires directly engaging with the HR department and established team members via multiple meetings, email communication, or a combination. While onboarding should have some level of personal interaction, relying strictly on a manual approach can cause inefficiencies for your team. This is because:

• Multiple in-person or online meetings can be time-consuming and can result in HR reps falling behind on other duties.

• If you have multiple HR reps, the information covered in training can be inconsistent.

• It can be difficult to track progress and monitor how well the new hire is learning the information.

Automated onboarding streamlines the onboarding process by incorporating AI and automation. Businesses can do this with processes like workflow automation and optimising knowledge centres. Overall, it creates an efficient experience for new starters and HR reps because:

• AI can help new hires get the help they need—fast.

• Automation results in an effective, repeatable, and scalable onboarding process.

• It can eliminate repetitive tasks, allowing employees to finish onboarding faster and HR reps to focus on more important tasks.

5 methods to automate employee onboarding

You can automate your employee onboarding process in several ways. Here are some of the most impactful.

1. Engage in workflow automation

Workflow automation is a process businesses use to automate routine tasks and streamline organisational activities. It can involve anything from automatically tracking employee onboarding to using AI to screen CVs and automate the hiring process.

Organisations can use workflow automation to streamline onboarding tasks like document submission, approvals, follow-ups, and more in the context of employee onboarding. Businesses can also identify and automate new hires' common requests throughout the employee journey.

2. Offer 24/7 service with Generative AI bots

New starters have questions—and some have a lot. While they need answers, it’s inefficient for them to repeatedly message a colleague or an HR rep. Instead, you can harness Generative AI to aid in the onboarding process.

AI agents—an advanced chatbot powered by generative AI—can provide new hires with round-the-clock support. These virtual assistants can provide instant, accurate replies to your employees, direct them to helpful resources, and more. This can be useful when managers are busy or out of the office and can bridge the gap between team time zone differences.

3. Build knowledge centre content faster using generative AI

A knowledge base is your organisational Library of Alexandria. It’s a source of information that customers and employees can use to find information about a company’s products, services, or industry-related topics. Employees can typically access employee handbooks, product or Software information, and other important documentation for internal purposes.

You can use Generative AI to help you build an AI knowledge base that can help you identify knowledge gaps, create content faster, and help new hires find the resources they need. This can make onboarding easier, resulting in faster development and increased employee satisfaction.

4. Streamline how you operate with AI-powered insights and reporting

Artificial intelligence can provide your team with valuable information that you can use to improve your onboarding processes. This can include:

• AI-powered reporting that highlights process inefficiencies, onboarding trends, and customer service key performance indicators (KPIs). This can identify improvement opportunities that you can use to improve onboarding.
• Macro suggestions allow admins to assist with customer service interactions and resolve tickets faster by offering suggestions based on common questions and knowledge gaps.
• Intent suggestions tell admins exactly what to automate based on conversation history.

Through features like this, you can monitor performance and pivot your processes when necessary.

5. Improve onboarding service quality with AI-powered QA

Quality assurance (QA) is an approach that ensures products and services meet or exceed expectations—and in the context of onboarding, QA can help you ensure new hires get up to speed. With the help of an AI solution like Zendesk QA, you can use artificial intelligence to evaluate 100% of support agent conversations. This can help managers give real-time feedback and provide coaching sessions to new starters. That way, they can learn on the job and become qualified employees faster.

Benefits of an automated onboarding process

Automated onboarding can help your organisation in several ways. Here are some of the major benefits you will see in your operations.

Increased efficiency

Automated onboarding streamlines administrative tasks, reducing the need for manual work. For example, rather than having an HR rep manually check in with a new hire to ensure they complete the required onboarding steps, an automated workflow system can keep the new hire moving throughout the process without human intervention. This can help HR focus on other important tasks whilst ensuring the new hire learns and progresses smoothly.

Upgraded employee experience

An automated onboarding process provides new employees with a smoother start to their careers and improves their employee experience (EX). Through AI-powered self-service, Generative AI bots, and other forms of onboarding automation, new starters get the answers they need fast. Doing so can be a key component of employee experience management (EXM) and makes them happy from day one.

Improved time savings

Automation can speed up onboarding, allowing new employees to become productive faster. For example, rather than scheduling multiple one-to-one meetings, new starters can use self-help resources and bots to answer questions and get up to speed. This allows employees to learn quickly and contribute to their teams sooner.

Boosted cost savings and scalability

With manual onboarding, there can be a limit to how many new hires you can onboard at a time. If every onboarding step requires an in-person meeting or a task that an HR rep must sign off on, it can severely bottleneck your operations. With automation, you can save money by allowing HR representatives to focus on more important manual tasks whilst providing the scalability you need to onboard multiple employees simultaneously.

Employee onboarding automation best practices

Finally, before embarking on onboarding automation, you’ll want to follow a few best practices. Here are our top tips.

Protect sensitive employee data

As with any automation, you should protect employee information during onboarding. Ensure any systems you use come with security protection measures like encryption and secure access controls, and follow cybersecurity best practice throughout the process.

At Zendesk, we can help you protect sensitive employee data with enterprise-grade privacy and security features like departmental permissions, data masking, advanced encryption keys, and more. Ensuring you have protections like these safeguards personal information and builds trust with new starters.

Consider how your AI tools are trained

How effective your onboarding automation is can be directly attributed to the quality of data the AI tool is trained on. Ensure you train your system using accurate and comprehensive data to provide reliable support. For example, our AI is pre-trained on HR and IT intent models—meaning no lengthy implementation times and faster, more accurate employee service.Zendesk AI is pre-trained on HR intent models, meaning no lengthy implementation times and faster, more accurate employee service.

Automate quickly by creating a knowledge base

A well-structured knowledge base is crucial for a smooth onboarding process. Ensure your internal library is filled with helpful articles, FAQ pages, do-it-yourself guides, and other relevant onboarding information.

Also, consider using a bot to help you build that knowledge base and make it easier to use for new starters and employees. With Zendesk, you can connect your bot directly to your information so it can answer common onboarding questions and direct new hires to helpful articles. From there, you can connect it to your back-end systems to automate your onboarding processes even more.

Monitor and improve the process

Engage in continuous monitoring and improvement to ensure your onboarding process is efficient. Monitor analytics and KPIs like employee satisfaction, and lean on automated QA systems to get an idea of how your system is performing. You could also ask employees directly how their onboarding went after completion.

Frequently asked questions

Automate employee onboarding with Zendesk for HR

Businesses need a plan for employee onboarding so new hires can get acclimatised as quickly as possible. While many may opt for a manual approach, onboarding automation can streamline your processes and create more efficient employees. For that, you need the right partner to be with you for onboarding and beyond.

At Zendesk, our employee service solution can help your HR and IT teams support employees in the moments that matter most—whether that be onboarding new hires, answering benefits questions, managing leave requests, or processing offboarding. With powerful self-service capabilities, advanced automation and integrated case management, Zendesk can help you deliver top-tier service while keeping costs low. Not only that, but Zendesk is customisable, easy to integrate with your existing systems, and has a low total cost of ownership.

Learn more about how Zendesk for employee service can streamline your HR service delivery.