No new hire left behind.

01 · The challenge

The gap between “hired” and day one.

• Orientation invitations were sent by hand, from a tracker kept separately
• Recruiting data lived in another system, so onboarding was always a step behind
• One hire arrived without clearance. Another started missing a required document
• Anyone who missed an orientation had to be tracked on yet another manual list

02 · What I built

Automatic, with a person in the loop.

1. PullThe pending-hires report syncs in every day
2. FilterOnly this division’s accounts make the list
3. ApproveA person confirms each hire and the orientation date
4. InviteThe new hire gets a welcome email for the right session
5. NotifyThe hiring manager and team are copied automatically

1. The right people, automatically. The enterprise pending-hires report is filtered to the division’s own accounting codes and merged into Smartsheet daily.
2. Nobody disappears. The merge adds and updates rows without removing them, so a hire stays on the list even after their status changes in the source system.
3. A human approves first. Automation does the sorting, but a person signs off on each hire before an email goes out.
4. The right session, every time. Each welcome email is matched to the next scheduled orientation, and the manager’s notice follows on its own.
5. A dashboard for what’s coming. Confirmed hires and candidates still in the pipeline, side by side.

03 · A choice that mattered

Don’t make a second source of truth.

Clinical onboarding checklists already live in a training platform. It would have been easy to copy them into Smartsheet too. I recommended against it. You don’t pull a source of truth into a second system just to make it a second source of truth.

Smartsheet does what it’s best at here: moving people through the steps and making sure nobody is missed.

04 · Where else it works

Any onboarding that starts in someone’s inbox.

The same pattern fits new-hire orientation, contractor onboarding, credentialing, and any process where people come from one system and need to be guided, on time, through the next one.