The New Starter Who Arrived to Nothing
A new starter walks through the door on their first day, full of enthusiasm, and within an hour it's clear that nobody told IT they were coming. No laptop. No account. No access to anything.
The situation
We were asked to look at the onboarding process at a mid-sized organisation that had grown quickly over the previous two years.
It's an embarrassing situation — and an entirely avoidable one. But it keeps happening, because the process that was supposed to prevent it was built on email.
What we found wasn't disorganisation
- ✓Good people in HR
- ✓A capable IT team
- ✓Hiring managers who cared about getting it right
- ✓The problem was the process connecting them
Every new hire triggered a chain of emails. Someone would start a thread, loop in the relevant people, and hope the right information reached the right person at the right time. Sometimes it did. Often it didn't.
IT found out about new starters too late. Contracts went back and forth in email attachments. Nobody had a clear view of where any particular hire was in the process, and the experience varied depending on who was managing it that week.
Everyone was working hard. The system they were working within was letting them down.
One record, one list, one journey
Interview
Shortlist
Offer
Contract
Equipment
Account setup
The fix wasn't a new HR system or a complex piece of software. It was a single SharePoint list, built around the stages of the hiring journey from first interview through to the new starter's first day.
Before we built anything, we mapped the process end to end with the people who actually lived it — HR, IT, and a couple of hiring managers. That conversation alone was useful. For the first time, everyone could see where handoffs were happening, where things were getting stuck, and where the same information was being entered multiple times.
A candidate entered the system once, at the interview stage, and that same record progressed through every stage. No new software was purchased. No training programme was required. The tools were already there — they just hadn't been connected in a way that reflected how the work actually needed to flow.
IT found out about new starters too late
HR spent Friday afternoons chasing equipment requests
Each hiring manager experienced a different process
Contracts assembled from scratch, every single time
IT knew about new starters weeks in advance
HR could monitor compliance without chasing anyone
Every team could see exactly where things stood
Offer letters and contracts generated from the record
The lesson
The change in experience was immediate. New starters arrived to a desk that was ready for them. The hiring managers — who had quietly accepted the chaos as normal — found the whole thing significantly less stressful. The lesson wasn't really about SharePoint. It was about what happens when you take the time to look at a process properly, involve the people who run it, and resist the temptation to solve a process problem with more technology. Sometimes the answer is simply a clearer version of what you already have.
Does this sound familiar?
If any of this resonates — the wrong versions, the chasing, the tools nobody quite trusts — it's worth a conversation. Most of the problems we fix are more straightforward than they feel from the inside.
No obligation. No hard sell. If it's not the right fit, I'll tell you.
