Employee onboarding

Automate new hire onboarding in Ravenna with one intake event, a parent ticket in People Ops, child tickets per team, and group-based provisioning timed off the start date.

Onboarding is the best first process to automate: it matters, and it happens the same way every time. One intake event can produce every account, every piece of hardware, and every checklist item, all timed off the start date.

Prerequisites: the Day one track and task templates. Read employee lifecycle architecture first, because this page assumes its intake and fan-out. For Ravenna to grant access rather than track it, connect an identity provider and read access provisioning.

The shape of it

1. One intake event

   A webhook, an alert channel, or a New hire form. All three produce the same fields.

2. A parent ticket in People Ops

   The one ticket that answers “where is this up to”.

3. A child ticket per team

   Each carries the hire’s data and fires that team’s own workflow.

4. A task template on each child

   The work a system cannot do: desk, laptop, buddy, first-week agenda.

5. Group membership for the system work

   Requested from the child that owns it, scheduled off the start date.

1. Capture the hire

On the form path, build a New hire form. On the webhook or alert path, this is the field set your trigger prompt should produce.

Field	Type	Why
First and last name	Text	Account creation
Work email	Text	The identity every step keys off
Personal email	Text	Reaching them before they have an account
Employee ID	Text	Reconciling with the HRIS
Start date	Date	Everything else schedules from this
Manager	User	Approvals and extra tooling
Department	Select	Which group bundle applies
Role or title	Text	Access tier within the department
Country	Select	Statutory steps
Location	Select	Shipping and building access
Hardware needs	Select	Laptop type, monitor, phone

Bundle access by department plus role and the form stays this short forever. Keep the start date date-only, so every Wait Until offset lands on the day you meant.

2. Create the task templates

One template per team’s child ticket, holding the work a system cannot do. Write it in the order it happens, since that is the order it keeps, and group it with section headers: Before day one, Day one, First week.

The manual steps that come up on every real onboarding:

Task	Usual owner
Order and image the laptop	IT
Ship equipment to the work location	IT or Facilities
Grant building access and issue a badge	Facilities
Add to team Slack channels	IT
Schedule orientation and the first-week agenda	Manager
Assign an onboarding buddy	Manager
Send the welcome email with sign-in instructions	IT

Importing a template sets the ticket’s whole task list, so apply it once, early.

Learn more about task templates

3. Build the workflows

People Ops hands the work out. Each team runs their own half, which is what keeps this maintainable.

People Ops

1. Trigger on your intake

   Webhook, Ticket Created on the alert channel, or Form Submitted filtered to the New hire form.

2. Create the parent ticket

   Webhook path only. The form and alert paths already produced it.

3. Create one child per team

   A Create Ticket step each: their workspace, Parent ticket set to the parent, and Form pointed at the intake ticket’s form so the child arrives with the data on it.

4. Announce it

   Send Message to the onboarding channel, Send Email to the personal address.

Each team, IT as the example

1. Trigger on Ticket Created

   Filtered to the IT lifecycle channel. The child publishes on creation, so this fires with nothing else wiring it up.

2. Apply the task template

   Apply Task Template, so the checklist exists from the moment the ticket does.

3. Create the account, if it does not exist

   Ravenna-as-source pattern only. Create User in Okta, Google Workspace, or Entra ID.

4. Branch on department and add the groups

   An If / Else per department, then request that department’s access levels. The Group provisioning method adds the person to the mapped group and your provider assigns everything behind it, so three memberships can hand over ten applications.

5. Schedule around the start date

   Wait Until the start date with a negative offset such as -3d for hardware, then a second branch on the date itself for account activation.

6. Report back to the parent

   Send Message on the parent when the team’s work is done.

Learn more about the cross-workspace fan-out and Wait Until

Let Copilot build it

Describe the end state and Copilot plans the workflow before creating anything.

When the New hire form is submitted, create a child ticket in the IT workspace, one in Facilities, and one in Finance, each with its parent set to the triggering ticket and its form set to the New hire form. Then post the hire's name and start date to #people-ops.

CopiedCopy prompt

When a ticket is created in the IT onboarding channel, apply the IT onboarding task template. If the department is Engineering, request the Engineering baseline access level. Wait until three days before the start date, then post a reminder to #it-ops to image the laptop.

CopiedCopy prompt

Copilot builds the draft. You review it and publish.

Learn more about building automations with Copilot

4. Ask the manager for the exceptions

The department bundle covers the standard case, and there is always a second pass. Rather than growing the intake form with every possible tool, send the manager a short form once the base setup is running: “anything beyond the standard setup?”

Their answers feed a second provisioning pass on the same child ticket. The intake stays short, the decision sits with the person who knows, and you get a record of why someone has Figma when their department bundle does not include it.

5. Decide what needs approval

Most onboarding access should not need approval, because the hire itself was the approval. Gate only the expensive or sensitive tiers: production access, finance systems, admin roles.

Attach an access policy to those access levels with an approval template routing to the manager or system owner. Access levels with no policy are auto-approved, which is the right default for a standard bundle.

Learn more about access policies and approval flows

6. Handle the parts that fail

Provisioning reaches into other people’s systems, so give yourself a way to see when one does not answer. Three places to look:

• A workflow on Entitlement Status Changed for Failed Provisioning, posting to your triage channel
• Workflow failure notifications by Slack or email
• The Entitlements tab under Settings > Applications on the morning of a start date, which shows status and time left per grant

Learn more about entitlements and workflow monitoring

7. Test it on a real hire, with a human watching

Run the whole thing for the next actual new starter, with someone shadowing every step. You will find one missing group and one wrong owner, and it is much cheaper to find them with a person watching.

Where teams get this wrong

Per-person access lists

Bundle by role and department, or the form grows forever.

One workflow for every team

IT, Facilities, and Finance each need their own child ticket and their own workflow.

Everything at the start date

Hardware needs lead time. Use negative offsets on Wait Until.

Approvals on standard access

Gating the whole bundle turns a five-minute automation into a two-day wait, and people go around it.

No failure path

Watch Failed Provisioning so you catch a missing grant while there is still time to fix it.

Next

Employee offboarding

The same machinery, run in reverse and with a deadline.

Approval flows

Rounds, parallel approvers, and dynamic approvers like the requester’s manager.