Onboarding & Offboarding Management

Onboarding and offboarding management is the coordination of every task that a joiner or leaver needs across HR, IT, finance, and the hiring manager. Without a system, those tasks live in email and checklists, and steps like access removal get missed. SmartSuite creates the task list for each event from a template, assigns each task to its team, and tracks completion on the employee record, so new hires are ready on day one and leavers are closed out completely.

When a start date is set on the employee record, an automation creates the onboarding tasks from the template for that role and location, assigns each to HR, IT, or the manager, and sets due dates relative to the start date. Reminders go out before each due date. The manager sees the whole plan on one record.

Offboarding starts from the leave date: an automation creates the exit tasks, including access removal requests in the service desk, equipment return in IT Asset Management, final pay, and documentation. Tasks that protect data, such as access removal, carry the earliest due dates and escalate if they slip. The record closes when every task is complete.

All teams work on the same employee record, where each task shows its owner, status, and due date. Comments and @mentions keep questions with the task instead of in email. A dashboard grouped by team shows HR, IT, and finance what is due this week.

Compliance steps, such as policy acknowledgments, background checks, and required training, are tasks on the checklist with required evidence fields. The record cannot be marked complete until they are done, and Activity History records who completed each step and when. Auditors review the record rather than a reconstructed file.

Yes. Each country, entity, or employee type can have its own task template, with routing rules that send tasks to the right local team, while all events sit in one table with permissions that keep each region’s data separate. Reporting rolls up across every region for the people operations leader. Adding a location means adding a template, not a new process.

Dashboards show onboarding and offboarding events by status, overdue tasks by team, and average days to complete, with each widget drilling into the records behind it. HR uses them to spot bottlenecks, for example access requests that wait on IT. The same dashboard supports the weekly people operations review.

New hires experience a plan rather than a scramble: their equipment, access, and introductions are scheduled before they arrive. Teams stop re-creating checklists and chasing updates, because the template and the reminders do that work. Leaders see the time to productive start fall as the process is tuned.