Onboarding in Make

What it does

1. Operations adds the new hire to a sheet: name, role, start date and manager.
2. Every morning Make picks up new hires and checks the row first.
3. If the start date is missing or the role has no checklist, it marks the row and emails operations. It does not guess.
4. Otherwise it writes one task for every checklist item, each with an owner and a due date counted from the start date.
5. For a provider it also makes their contract from a template, with their name, role and start date filled in.
6. An email with the full checklist goes out, with the team named in the subject. A second check each morning emails one list of overdue tasks and stuck hires, and stays silent when there is nothing to report.

What keeps it safe

• A role with no checklist, or a missing start date, stops and asks. A wrong checklist looks finished, which is worse than one that asks.
• Checklists live in a sheet tab, so changing how you onboard means editing the tab, not the automation.
• Every failed Google step is logged and retried 3 times, 2 minutes apart. A retry resumes where it failed, so there is no second contract and no duplicate tasks.

How I tested it

• Of 5 test hires, 3 were set up (one provider with 10 tasks and a contract, two staff with 6 tasks each) and 2 were held with an email saying why.
• I broke it on purpose by renaming a tab the run needed. It logged the error and held the hire, and after I fixed the tab it finished with 6 tasks and no duplicates.
• The next run touched only the 1 new hire. The 6 earlier rows were left alone.
• The first run of 5 hires used 45 credits of Make's free plan, which has 1,000 a month.

Built with

• Make
• Google Sheets
• Google Docs