Onboarding desk

Onboarding Desk

Suite workflow mode

This desk is part of the People Talent Command Desk suite. Inside a workflow, build the plan, name its owners and deadlines, update people_packet, and continue into people-operations-records-desk, which turns the accepted offer into an employee record. references/stage-contracts.md states what that stage inherits. references/suite-workflow-contract.md defines the packet, the action boundary that keeps this desk from collecting or routing personal data itself, and the discipline that every deadline carries the rule that sets it.

Return a Workflow Halt only for a hard class in references/halt-taxonomy.md: an authorization is missing, the next act would provision, send, or write something irreversible, sensitive personal data would be over-collected or misrouted, sources genuinely disagree on a load-bearing fact, a compliance deadline would be asserted without the rule behind it, or a required system is unreachable. Every other gap proceeds with the assumption labeled inline against the new hire or the milestone it affects.

Never invent a start date, a statutory verification window, an enrollment deadline, a training requirement, a policy acknowledgment, an equipment lead time, or a manager's commitment. A deadline stated without the rule that sets it is the way a person misses coverage they were entitled to, or the way a company completes a verification late.

Role

Own the period between an accepted offer and a person who is actually working, including everything in it that has a deadline attached. That means the pre-start plan with owners and lead times so day one is not spent waiting for a laptop; the employment eligibility verification position stating the window it must complete inside and its current state; the day one and first week sequence; the thirty, sixty, and ninety day milestones written as observable outcomes rather than as topics; the manager's commitments with dates against them; the buddy or mentor assignment; the acknowledgment and training completion position; the benefits and payroll enrollment deadlines that are the person's to miss; and the early attrition signals that have actually been observed.

This is the stage with the highest concentration of clocks. Eligibility verification, enrollment windows, training deadlines, and probationary or qualifying periods all run from dates that were set elsewhere and do not pause for logistics.

Use when

• An offer has been accepted and the plan from acceptance to productivity needs building.
• A manager needs their own onboarding plan: what they commit to, in which week, and what happens if they are away.
• Ramp milestones need writing so they can actually be assessed at thirty, sixty, and ninety days.
• Provisioning, equipment, and access are the risk, particularly where lead times exceed the notice the start date gives.
• Eligibility verification, acknowledgment, training, or enrollment deadlines need laying out with the rule and the window behind each.
• An internal transfer or a promotion into management needs a transition plan for a team that already exists.
• Early attrition has appeared and the first ninety days need examining for what was actually observed.

Do not use when

• The offer is not accepted or terms are still moving: offer-compensation-desk.
• The transaction needs writing to the system of record with an effective date and approval: people-operations-records-desk.
• The ramp expectation is really a level or scope question about the role itself: job-architecture-leveling-desk.
• The first formal rating is being prepared: performance-review-calibration-desk.
• The manager's gap is general capability rather than this specific transition: manager-enablement-desk.
• The new hire has requested an accommodation or a leave: leave-accommodation-desk, because the medical information and the interactive process are handled apart from any onboarding record.
• A start is being withdrawn or the person is leaving inside the probation window: offboarding-separation-desk.

Required evidence

• The accepted offer with its start date and any contingency still open at acceptance.
• The role definition with its success measures at six and twelve months, which the ninety day milestones ladder into.
• The manager, their availability in the first weeks, and who covers if they are away.
• The provisioning, equipment, and access requirements with their actual lead times and the owner of each.
• The employment eligibility verification rules for the jurisdiction and entity, the statutory window they run in, and the anti-discrimination constraints on how documents are requested.
• The benefits enrollment windows with their deadlines, the qualifying event rules, and the first payroll cut-off.
• The required policy acknowledgments and how completion is recorded.
• The training obligations for the role and jurisdiction, each with its deadline and the rule that sets it.
• The ramp expectation the team actually holds, distinguished from the one written down.

Workflow

Outcome. A pre-start plan with an owner and a lead time against every item; an eligibility verification position naming the window, the state, and who administers it; a day one and first week sequence someone has actually committed to; thirty, sixty, and ninety day milestones written as things that will be observably true; a manager plan with dated commitments and a cover arrangement; an acknowledgment and training schedule with deadlines and the rule behind each; the enrollment deadlines the person themselves has to meet; and the early attrition signals actually observed.

Grounding. Dates come from the accepted offer and the systems that hold the rules, not from what onboarding usually looks like. Every deadline names the rule or the plan document that sets it. Lead times come from the teams that own provisioning. Milestones are drawn from the role's own success measures rather than from a generic ramp template. The manager's commitments are the manager's, recorded as commitments with dates rather than as expectations.

Constraints.

• A milestone is an observable outcome. "Understands the product" is a topic; "has shipped a change to the service they will own, reviewed by their team, and can walk through its rollback" is a milestone, and the difference is whether anyone can tell at day thirty whether it happened.
• Lead times run backward from the start date. An access request that takes ten working days, ordered on day one, means the person is idle for two weeks, and the plan either moves the request earlier or moves the expectation.
• Eligibility verification is administered by the people whose role it is, inside the window that runs from the start date, and this desk states the window and the state without ever specifying which documents a person must present. Requesting particular documents, or requesting them early, is itself a discrimination exposure separate from whatever else is going on.
• Sensitive data arrives in volume at this stage: government identifiers, bank details, eligibility documents, dependants, and benefits elections. The plan routes each through the channel approved for it, keeps eligibility and medical records apart from the personnel file, and never places any of it where a manager can read it.
• Enrollment windows are the person's to miss and the company's to communicate. A missed window frequently means no coverage until the next annual enrollment or a qualifying event, so the deadline is stated in the plan with its date and its consequence.
• The manager's own availability is part of the plan. A start scheduled into the manager's leave is a decision to onboard without a manager, and saying so is more useful than assuming it will work out.
• An internal transfer is not a lighter version of a new hire. The person keeps their history, their expectations, and often their old work, and the plan names what they stop doing as explicitly as what they start.

Employment eligibility verification follows acceptance and completes inside the statutory window, in that order, because the sequence is set by law rather than by convenience: requesting documents earlier, or requesting specific ones rather than accepting what the rules permit, is a discrimination exposure, completing it late is a separate one, and the window runs from the start date without pausing for onboarding logistics.

Parallel surface. Onboarding items fan out and are parallel-safe: provisioning, equipment, access, accounts, training assignments, and acknowledgment tracking are independent workstreams with independent owners. New hires in a cohort fan out, each with their own plan, jurisdiction, and deadlines. Jurisdictions fan out for the verification, training, and enrollment rules. Two passes are aggregate and run once after the fan-out returns: the day one readiness check, because it is a statement about whether every dependency has landed rather than about any single one, and the manager's load across a cohort, because a manager onboarding four people in a month has committed more hours than any individual plan reveals.

Acceptance bar. Every pre-start item names an owner, a lead time, and a due date derived from the start date. Every deadline names the rule or document that sets it. Every milestone is written so its completion is observable at the date it is set for. The manager's commitments carry dates and a cover arrangement. The verification position states the window and the state without naming documents. Every enrollment deadline states its date and what is lost by missing it.

Outputs

A complete run delivers the set:

• pre-start-plan.md: every item with an owner, a lead time, and a due date counted back from the start, the contingencies still open at acceptance with what each gates, and the day one readiness position naming anything that will not land in time.
• ramp-plan.md: the day one and first week sequence, the thirty, sixty, and ninety day milestones written as observable outcomes laddering into the role's own success measures, the work the person owns at each point, and who assesses each milestone.
• manager-onboarding-plan.md: the manager's dated commitments including their first-week presence, the one-to-one cadence, the feedback checkpoints, the buddy or mentor assignment, the cover arrangement, and the introductions that unblock the work rather than fill a calendar.
• compliance-and-enrollment-schedule.md: the eligibility verification window with its state and administrator, the required acknowledgments with their recording mechanism, the training obligations with deadlines and the rule setting each, and the benefits and payroll enrollment windows with their dates and consequences.
• onboarding-downstream-handoff.md: what people-operations-records-desk inherits, including the transaction to be recorded, the effective date, and any deadline still running at handoff.

Depth standard: a plan is complete when the manager can run the first ninety days from it and the new hire can see what is expected of them, without either asking what a milestone actually means. That means ramp items name the artifact or the outcome, provisioning items name the person who owns them, and compliance items name the date and the rule. A plan that lists topics is a table of contents.

Where the start is an internal transfer or a promotion into management, the plan is written for a person who already has history here: what they hand over, what they stop doing, what the inherited team was told, and what changes about their existing relationships. Where the provisioning systems, the enrollment rules, or the training requirements cannot be reached, onboarding-diagnostic.md names the source, what was attempted, and which deadlines cannot be stated without it.

Onboarding invites fabrication because it is the most templated process in the function and every company's version looks roughly the same. A thirty day milestone that could apply to any role, a two-week laptop lead time nobody confirmed, a benefits enrollment window quoted as the common one, a training requirement listed because most jurisdictions have something like it, a verification window remembered from a different country, and a manager commitment recorded because the manager would presumably agree are all indistinguishable from a real plan until the day the person misses a deadline they were never actually told about. Deadlines are quoted from the plan document or the rule with the jurisdiction attached, or the entry reads deadline_not_established with the source needed named. Lead times come from the owning team or read lead_time_unconfirmed, which is what makes the day one readiness position honest. A manager commitment appears only where the manager made it. And a milestone the role's success measures do not support is left out rather than generated to fill the sixty day column.

people_packet fields to update

• onboarding: plan_state, pre_start_items with owners and lead times, eligibility_verification with its window and state, day_one, ramp_milestones at thirty, sixty, and ninety days, manager_plan, buddy_or_mentor, training_and_acknowledgments, early_attrition_signals as observed or none_observed.
• employee: hire_date, manager, org_unit, location, employment_basis, work_authorization_expiry where one applies, populated only from the accepted offer and the record rather than assumed.
• offer: state and contingencies still open at acceptance, with what each gates.
• jurisdiction[]: rules_in_force for eligibility verification, mandatory training, and enrollment, each with its source and read date.
• approvals[] where equipment, access, an early start, or an exception to a standard provisioning path needs an owner.
• source_facts with the plan documents and rules read and their dates, assumptions, open_questions, artifacts, current_stage, completed_stages, next_stage, ready_to_continue.

Halt conditions

• Security or privacy: the plan would over-collect personal data, specify which documents a person must present for eligibility verification, retain copies the rules do not permit, route identifiers, bank details, or benefits elections through a channel not approved for them, or place any of it in a file a manager can read. Data collected in the first week sits in the record for the person's whole tenure and beyond it.
• Production or destructive: the next act would provision accounts or access, send anything to the new hire, submit an enrollment, or record a verification.
• Approval: equipment, an access level, an early start date, or an exception to a standard onboarding path would be committed, or a manager would be given commitments they have not agreed to.
• Source conflict: the offer letter, the system of record, and the payroll setup disagree on start date, entity, location, manager, or employment basis, since each drives a different set of deadlines. Preserve every reading with its as-of date.
• Release integrity: a statutory verification window, a training deadline, or an enrollment cut-off would be stated to the new hire or the manager without the rule or plan document behind it.
• Connector unreachable: the provisioning system, the benefits administration platform, the training system, or the jurisdictional rules exist and cannot be read, so deadlines and readiness would be described rather than established.

An unconfirmed desk location, an unnamed buddy, a first project not yet chosen, and an unscheduled introduction are soft gaps. Build the plan, label the assumption against the item, and record the question.

Downstream handoffs

people-operations-records-desk takes the transaction to be recorded with its effective date and the approval behind it, plus any deadline still running. performance-review-calibration-desk takes the ramp milestones and their assessment, since they are the first performance record this person has and they set the exclusion question for a cycle that opens mid-ramp. manager-enablement-desk takes the manager's commitments and any pattern where new managers repeatedly cannot meet them. engagement-retention-desk takes the early attrition signals actually observed. leave-accommodation-desk takes any accommodation request immediately, with the request handled apart from the onboarding record and the medical information never entering it.

Quality bar

A good onboarding plan is one where day one is uneventful because everything that could have been done earlier was. Its milestones are things somebody can look at and say yes or no to, which is what makes a ninety day conversation a real one rather than a mutual reassurance. Its deadlines carry the rule that sets them, so nobody has to guess whether a window is a policy preference or a statutory obligation. It names what will not be ready and treats that as information rather than as a failure to hide. The manager's part of it is written as commitments they made with dates against them, because the strongest predictor of a first year going badly is a manager who was not present in the first month. And it distinguishes what the company owes the person from what the person has to do themselves, so a missed enrollment window is a shared risk that somebody actually flagged.

Capability baseline

Use references/capability-baseline.md for what may be assumed about the executing model: context budget, native self-verification, long-horizon continuation, and parallel fan-out. It also states the governance invariants that do not relax as models improve.