Onboarding launch: from a week of chasing to under an hour.
SaaS · 50→80 employees · venture-backed · built on Rippling
Hiring had gone from occasional to constant, and onboarding had not changed shape to match. Every new starter meant a person opening four systems in sequence: the HR record, the identity provider, the device queue, and the benefits portal.
None of it was difficult. All of it was manual, which meant it was only as reliable as whoever was doing it that week. A missed step surfaced on somebody’s first morning, usually as a laptop that had not shipped or an account that did not exist, and the fix always cost more attention than the original task would have.
One record, one trigger, four things that happen on their own.
- Four systems touched by hand for every hireOne triggered sequence from a single employee record
- Provisioning depended on somebody rememberingAccounts, devices and access fire on the same event
- Benefits enrolment chased over emailEnrolment opens automatically at the right point
- Permissions inherited from whoever set them up firstAccess designed by role before anything was switched on
The work was mostly design rather than configuration. We mapped what actually had to happen between an accepted offer and a productive first morning, decided which of those steps a system could own, and gave the rest a named human owner.
Permissions came first. Rippling ties HR, payroll, devices and app access to one employee record, which is exactly why a careless access decision spreads. We designed the role structure before configuring anything, so provisioning could be automated without widening what anyone could see.
What a build includesOnboarding launch cut from ~1 week to under 1 hour.
Launching a new starter went from a sequence somebody worked through to a single action that sets the rest running. The measure that mattered to the team was not the time saved on paper — it was that a first morning stopped being a thing anyone had to worry about the night before.
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We sequenced device provisioning before the identity work was fully settled, which meant redoing part of it when the access model changed. On later builds the identity provider is agreed and wired first, and everything that depends on it follows.
We also underestimated how much of onboarding lives outside the HRIS — the team introduction, the first-week plan, the person who checks in on day three. Automation made the mechanical part reliable and left that part exactly where it was.
20 minutes. No deck. No pitch.
You talk. We map what you’re running and where to start. The fixed quote follows the call, in writing.