Create onboarding and offboarding workflows – Personio

This article explains how to build onboarding and offboarding workflows. These workflows enable you to automate and streamline the onboarding and offboarding process for your employees.

What are onboarding and offboarding workflows?

For both workflows, you will need to create onboarding and offboarding steps, groups, and templates—see the table below for a description of these concepts.

Instruction	Description
Create onboarding and offboarding steps	Each step is an action or task that an employee or team must complete. You use these steps to build your onboarding or offboarding template. You can build a collection of steps and reuse them as required in your templates. An example of an onboarding step might be “set up workspace” or “send welcome email”.
Create onboarding and offboarding groups	You can use onboarding and offboarding groups to assign responsibility for a particular step to a group of employees. You can also set this group as recipients of an email action. An example of a group might be “HR team” or “IT team”.
Create onboarding and offboarding templates	You build onboarding or offboarding templates using the steps you have previously created. You can then assign templates to employees as part of their onboarding or offboarding process. You can also assign the templates directly when employees have been hired from Recruiting (when a candidate profile is converted to an employee profile). Employees then complete the steps that they are responsible for. You can create different templates for different employment types, for example, you might create a template for full-time permanent employees and another template for part-time working students.

Create onboarding and offboarding steps

To build an onboarding or offboarding workflow, you first need to create steps. To create onboarding and offboarding steps:

Go to Settings > Automations > Onboarding/Offboarding.
Click either the Onboarding Steps or Offboarding Steps tab.
In the column of steps on the left, enter the name of the new step in the blank field. You can create two types of steps: a general step and an email action.
Click the plus icon to create the step.

General step

You can use the general step type for common onboarding and offboarding tasks, for example, “set up workspace” or “return hardware”.

To create a general step, you must add an item and select the item type. See the table below for further details on item types. You can add many items to a step.

Item type	Details
Text information	Create a block of text to explain how to fill out the rest of the form. URLs will be automatically converted to links.
Document for download	Upload a document that will be available for download by the employee.
Employee attribute	Choose from the list of specific employee attributes to help fill in employee information during the onboarding or offboarding process.
Profile picture	Upload a profile picture for the employee.
Checkbox	Display a checkbox that the employee can check (or has to check).
Fill text field	Display a text field where the employee can enter a line of text or several lines of text.
Enter URL	Display a text field in which to enter a valid URL.
Upload document	The responsible employee uploads a document and links it with a certain section of the document module.

Email action

Note
When selecting your email recipient(s), make sure that at least one recipient belonging to the Onboarding/Offboarding Team or Employee Team has an active login. One of the following criteria needs to be fulfilled: A valid email address, an active account, or their login status is either “joined” or “invited”.

An email action is an email that you send at a specific point in a workflow. To create an email action, follow these steps:

Choose from the three different sending options, as shown below.
▶︎ Send manually: The responsible employee(s) get a reminder to send out the email. You will define the employee or group that is responsible for this step when creating the Onboarding or Offboarding template.
▶︎ On due date: The email will automatically be sent on a date that you will define in the specific Onboarding template.
▶︎ When previous steps are completed: Personio will generate the auto dispatch only after all the previous Onboarding or Offboarding steps have been marked as completed.
Select the employee to appear as the sender of the email. The email will display the email signature set in Personio for the selected employee.
Select the email recipient(s). You can choose between the employee who has to complete the step, their supervisor, or all employees. You can also select employees who are part of the groups you create.
Fill in the subject field and write the content of the email in the email template. Optional: You can insert employee attributes into the email and also attach a document—the maximum file size is 256 MB.
Save your changes.

Edit an existing step

After you have created an onboarding or offboarding step, you can edit it, and add or remove items. Employees who have been assigned an onboarding or offboarding template can see the edited steps in their list of tasks.

What happens when I add, edit, or remove a step?

You can see in the table below what happens when you add, edit, or remove a step. In all these scenarios, the employee is already assigned to an onboarding or offboarding template.

Employee status	If	Then
Onboarding	You edit or add a step	The responsible employee sees the new or edited step in their list of tasks, and they can edit it.
Onboarding	You edit or add a step, and the responsible employee has already marked the step as “Completed”	The responsible employee sees the new or edited step in their list of tasks, but they can’t edit it. The step's status reverts to "Pending".
Active	You edit or add a step	The new or edited step does not appear. The responsible employee will not see any changes to their Onboarding tasks.
Active	You edit or add a step to an offboarding template. The responsible employee has already marked the step as “Completed”.	The responsible employee will see the status revert to "Pending" if it includes a new item.
Active	You add or remove a step in an offboarding template.	The update will affect all the employees the offboarding template is assigned. If the employee's offboarding status is "Completed", the new step does not appear.
Inactive	You edit or add a step to an offboarding template. The responsible employee has already marked the step as “Completed”.	The status of the step does not change. The new item appears in their offboarding steps, with a default "no" or "incomplete" status, and cannot be edited.
Any status	You remove a step	The step is removed from all employees' tasks, regardless of their status.

Create onboarding and offboarding groups

Tip
When a group is responsible for an onboarding or offboarding step, all employees in this group will receive a task notification on their Dashboard. However, only one employee needs to complete the task. Learn more about notifications in our article about assigning onboarding and offboarding templates.

To create an onboarding or offboarding group, follow these steps:

Go to Settings > Automations > Onboarding/Offboarding.
Click the Groups tab.
In the column on the left, enter the name of the new group into the blank field and click the plus icon.
The name of your group will appear on the right, along with two columns. In the left column, you can add employees by clicking on their names. The selected employees will then appear in the right column. To remove an employee from a group, click on their name in the right column.
Save your changes.

Create onboarding and offboarding templates

To create an onboarding or offboarding template, follow these steps:

Go to Settings > Automations > Onboarding/Offboarding.
Click Onboarding Templates or Offboarding Templates.
In the column on the left, enter the name of your new template and click the plus icon.
Click Add step. Select the step you want to add, the person, group, or team responsible and the deadline. The deadline triggers reminders and tasks.
Add further steps to the template as required. Click on the arrow icon to the left of each step to drag and change the order.
Save your changes.

Notes
▶︎ Offboarding steps are triggered based on the following deadlines: "Before termination or the last working day (if set)" or "After termination or the last working day (if set)".
▶︎ You can set the "last working day" when terminating the employee's employment in their profile. You can choose either the termination date or the contract end date as the last working day. If you don't set a “last working day”, then Personio will issue the offboarding steps from the termination date.

For an overview of the most commonly used templates and steps, refer to:

Edit existing templates

You can duplicate existing templates, and rename or edit them. Click the icons to the right of the template’s name to edit its name, duplicate, or delete it.

You can also add and remove steps in a template. For an overview of what happens when you add, edit, or remove a step, see the table in the section Edit an existing step.

Next steps

Once you have created a template, the next step is to assign it to your employee(s). Visit the article Assign and manage onboarding and offboarding templates. This article also explains notifications relating to an onboarding or offboarding workflow.

What can we help you with?