How a people team automates employee onboarding with Windmill
A new hire's accounts are not always ready on the first day.
For each arrival, HR sends emails to IT, the manager and payroll, follows a checklist in a spreadsheet and chases each person. Nobody has the whole picture. Here, one Windmill tool starts the arrival when the contract is signed, gets each step approved by the right person, answers the new hire's questions with an AI agent and shows each arrival's progress in one app.
The tool
This example is an internal tool for a people team (HR) and the IT team, built in one Windmill workspace from four pieces: a flow, approvals and reminders, an AI agent and an app. The data: arrivals (name, role, manager, start date), checklist steps and their status, hardware requests, and the onboarding guide (documents).
Each piece below comes with the prompt to build it in your own workspace, which you can give to AI Sessions. The whole project is on the Windmill Hub, with a recorded run of each piece, ready to add to your workspace: Employee onboarding on the Hub.
A webhook starts the onboarding flow
When a contract is signed in the HRIS, its webhook starts a flow. The flow creates the accounts, orders the hardware, notifies payroll and sends the new hire the first-week programme.
Read more: Triggers.
When a contract is signed in the HRIS, start an onboarding flow with accounts, hardware and payroll steps.
Approvals and reminders keep each step moving
The hardware order waits for the manager's approval in an approval step. A schedule runs every morning, finds the late steps and reminds their owners.
Read more: Approval steps.
Hardware orders need the manager's approval; remind owners of late steps every morning.
An AI agent answers the new hire's questions
An AI agent step answers the new hire's questions from the onboarding guide. It reads the guide with its tools, which are Windmill scripts. It also prepares the manager's welcome message as a draft. It answers only from the guide it is given, and it does not send anything on its own.
Read more: AI agents.
Add an agent that answers new hires' questions from our onboarding guide.
An app shows the progress of each arrival
A full-code app lists the upcoming arrivals, the progress of each checklist and the approvals waiting. In this example, personal data is only visible to HR and the manager.
Read more: Full-code apps.
Build a dashboard of upcoming arrivals with each checklist's progress.
A day with the tool
- A contract is signed for someone who starts in 3 weeks: the flow starts.
- The manager approves the laptop order, and IT receives the accounts request.
- A week before, the new hire receives the first-week programme and asks the agent a question, which answers from the guide.
- HR sees in the app that a payroll step is late. The reminder has already gone out.
- On the first day, everything is ready.