New Hire Onboarding/Milestones: Automation

Hi Asana Friends!

I’m looking for a way to streamline my new hire onboarding process. Once someone gets hired for our organization there are certain tasks my team of 3 needs to complete prior to them starting. Then we have milestones that need to be accomplished within their first 12 months that my team assists with.

Is there a way to create a workflow that sets up tasks based off of the new hires start date?
And is there a way to create a template that each new hire gets the same tasks within one project? i.e. “New Hire Tracking”

Any help is appreciated!

Hi @Dana_Gundrum and welcome back to the forum!

Asana is a great tool to use in the exact way you are looking for when it comes to getting new hires started at your company. In fact, this was one of the early use-cases that we used at my company that really got leadership excited about what Asana could do for us! The easiest way to get started is by creating a project to serve as a “New Hire Checklist” and filling in all of the relevant tasks with due dates and assignees that are associated with a new hire joining the company. Once you have the project set up how you want you can then save it as a template and then use it for all new hires going forward. Asana created a guide for this specific use case that you can use to get you started.

If you want to have the due-dates for tasks created based on a certain date, you can also build this into your template as well. This guide does a good job of explaining how to do this in Asana.

If you want to track all of you new hire’s progress towards accomplishing their tasks in one place, creating a New Hire Tracking Portfolio would be a good option. Basically you would just need to create a Portfolio in Asana called New Hire Tracking and then add all of the New Hire projects to the Portfolio and TADA :tada: you can now track all these different projects in one place.

Hopefully this answers your questions and provides you with the right tools to start using Asana for New Hire onboarding and tracking! If there is anything else I can help clarify please let me know.

Cheers!
Matt

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@Matt_Dickinson Is there a way to create one task and duplicate that for a new hire instead? We are anticipating hiring more than 100 people next year and I would prefer not to have 100 separate projects. That way I can host all 100 new hires in one project.

Let me know your thoughts.

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Hey @Dana_Gundrum
we have one Asana team which consists of template projects that we created for several processes and we also have one project that just contains template tasks like a „CS team member onboarding checklist (welcome pack), or a marketing team member onboarding checklist etc.

Whenever somebody starts I still prefer to create one private project for them as this way they can play around with Asana and learn better and organize tasks like they want and also tag this project to any tasks they get assigned which allows them to create their own dashboard in the way they want to.

I then also just copy the relevant welcome pack, assign to the new project and then assign to the new team member.

Having template tasks is key in my opinion as this allows you to move faster and more organized.

If you prefer to have just one project where you add all the onboarding tasks for new team members that works well too, then I would recommend having a few columns in there. For example:

template onboarding tasks
to assign
in progress
completed

Hope that helps :slight_smile:

Can share an example if you prefer

regards
Andrea

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@Dana_Gundrum,

Thanks for your question and sorry for the delayed response! I agree with everything @Andrea_Mayer suggests in her reply, my company’s approach to onboarding employees in Asana is also very similar. However, I think that the final suggestion made by @Andrea_Mayer of using template tasks in a single project and then organizing it into different columns is probably what you are looking for.

Maybe make a new project just for tracking the onboarding process for all of your new hires. Inside the project you can set up the template task to include all the things that need to be completed as part of onboarding as sub-tasks and then assign them to the proper individuals (i.e. HR rep for collecting new employee forms, IT rep for setting up user accounts, etc). Once you have the template task set up you can easily just duplicate it for each new hire and rename the task to the new hire’s name. If you use the board view for the project, you can set-up the columns like @Andrea_Mayer suggested but another way you could do it would be by week (i.e. Week 1, week 2, week 3, etc) or you could also divide into stages by major onboarding grouping (i.e. HR, IT, Manager, etc) or however you want. The beauty of Asana, as you know, is the ability to customize the set up to fit your specific needs and processes! Their is an Asana Guide for interview candidate tracking that is very similar to the method @Andrea_Mayer and I have described above that you might find useful to get some good ideas on how you can use and Asana project in this way.

Hopefully this helps and if you have any other questions please let me know!

Cheers!
Matt Dickinson

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