Manual onboarding tasks cost you time, accuracy, and new hires in the first 90 days. The fix isn’t more headcount or another point solution — it’s automating the plumbing between your ATS, HRIS, and payroll systems so data moves once and moves correctly. Below are 9 onboarding tasks that should never touch a human hand-typed field again in 2026, what breaks when you keep doing them manually, and what to automate instead using Make.com. Get these off manual and the rest of your onboarding process gets easier by default.

This list pairs with our employee onboarding checklist guide, which covers the full build-out. If you’re deciding whether to fix this yourself or bring in help, start there.

Every task below shares the same root cause: a human is copying, chasing, or remembering something a system should handle on its own. That’s not a training problem or a headcount problem. It’s a plumbing problem, and plumbing gets fixed with automation, not another hire or another dashboard nobody checks. The order matters too — start with whichever task on this list carries the highest financial or compliance risk in your organization, not whichever feels easiest to automate first.

1. Copying candidate data from your ATS into your HRIS

This is the single most dangerous manual task in onboarding, and it’s still the most common. Someone retypes a name, title, or salary field from one system into another, and one keystroke error becomes a payroll problem.

• Every re-typed field is a chance for transposition error
• Salary and title fields carry the highest financial risk
• No audit trail when something goes wrong
• Scales badly — the more hires, the more exposure

David, an HR Manager at a mid-market manufacturer, watched this play out directly: a manual ATS-to-HRIS transcription error mis-entered a $103K salary as $130K. Payroll ran on the wrong number, the company overpaid by $27K, and when the correction landed, the employee quit. One field, one keystroke, real money and a real resignation. Verdict: automate the sync, full stop. See our guide to automating new hire paperwork for the field-mapping approach that prevents this.

2. Routing new hire paperwork for signatures

Chasing signed offer letters, tax forms, and handbooks by email is slow and it’s the first impression a new hire gets of how your company runs.

• Manual routing means someone tracks who signed what
• Missing signatures surface weeks later, usually during an audit
• New hires wait on forms instead of starting productive work
• No single source of truth for document status

A Make.com workflow triggers document generation the moment a candidate accepts, routes it through e-signature, and files the completed set automatically. Verdict: fully automatable, no reason to keep it manual. This is the exact gap covered in our what is onboarding automation breakdown.

3. Provisioning IT accounts and system access

New hires showing up to a laptop with no logins, no email, and no access to the tools they need is a first-day failure that’s completely avoidable.

• IT tickets sit in a queue behind other requests
• Access requests get missed when they’re buried in email
• Security teams lose visibility into who has access to what
• Offboarding suffers the same problem in reverse

Trigger IT provisioning the moment HRIS marks a hire as confirmed — one Make.com workflow creates the ticket, assigns the right access tier, and notifies the new hire’s manager. Verdict: automate before day one, not after.

4. Sending benefits enrollment reminders

Benefits windows close. When reminders depend on someone remembering to send them, they slip, and a new hire misses coverage they’re entitled to.

• Enrollment deadlines are date-sensitive and unforgiving
• HR teams juggling multiple hires lose track of individual windows
• Missed enrollment creates real financial exposure for the employee
• Manual reminders depend on someone’s memory, not a system

A scheduled Make.com workflow reads the hire date from your HRIS and fires reminders on a fixed cadence, no human trigger required. Verdict: this should have never been manual to begin with.

5. Tracking background check status before setting a start date

Setting a start date before a background check clears creates compliance exposure and awkward conversations if the check comes back with a problem.

• Start dates get locked in before clearance is confirmed
• Vendor status updates arrive by email and get missed
• HR teams juggle multiple vendors with different notification formats
• No automatic hold on onboarding steps until clearance lands

Connect your background check vendor’s webhook to Make.com, and onboarding steps only fire once clearance status comes back clean. Verdict: automate the gate, don’t rely on someone checking a portal.

6. Requesting laptops and equipment for new hires

A new hire without a working laptop on day one wastes their first day and signals disorganization before they’ve done a single task.

• Equipment requests get lost in the shuffle of other onboarding steps
• Lead times on hardware mean late requests cause late starts
• No visibility into request status until someone asks
• IT and HR run separate systems that don’t talk to each other

A Make.com workflow creates the equipment ticket automatically the day an offer is signed, giving IT lead time instead of a scramble. Verdict: tie it to offer acceptance, not start date.

7. Assigning manager check-ins at 30/60/90 days

Managers are busy, and 30/60/90 check-ins are the easiest onboarding step to forget when nothing forces it onto a calendar.

• Manual reminders depend on managers checking their own notes
• Missed check-ins are directly tied to early turnover
• No consistent process across teams or departments
• HR has no visibility into whether check-ins actually happened

Sarah, an HR Director at a regional healthcare organization, automated exactly this kind of manager task handoff and reclaimed 12 hours a week while cutting her hiring time by 60%. Verdict: automate the trigger, let the conversation stay human. More on the difference in our manual vs automated onboarding comparison.

8. Assigning and tracking compliance training

Compliance training that depends on someone remembering to assign it is an audit finding waiting to happen.

• Training assignments get missed during busy hiring weeks
• No automatic escalation when a deadline is approaching
• Audit prep becomes a manual reconciliation project
• Inconsistent assignment across departments creates risk gaps

Trigger LMS enrollment automatically from your HRIS record the moment a hire is confirmed, with automatic reminders as deadlines approach. Verdict: this is a compliance risk you don’t need to carry.

9. Updating recruiting and leadership on onboarding status

Recruiters and leadership asking “where are we on this hire” is a sign the status update process is manual and broken.

• Status updates depend on someone remembering to send them
• Recruiters lose visibility once a candidate becomes a hire
• Leadership finds out about delays after they’ve already caused problems
• No single dashboard reflects real-time onboarding status

Nick, a recruiter at a small firm, automated his own status reporting loop and reclaimed 15 hours a week personally, with his three-person team reclaiming more than 150 hours a month combined. Verdict: automate the update, not just the task. TalentEdge ran this same logic across its full onboarding stack and posted $312K in annual savings with a 207% ROI.

How We Evaluated

Each task on this list was scored against four criteria: financial or compliance risk when done manually, frequency (does this happen on every single hire), whether a native Make.com connector or documented REST API exists for the systems involved, and whether removing the manual step required new headcount or just reconfigured plumbing. Tasks that failed any of the four didn’t make the list — this is not a wishlist, it’s the set of tasks where automation is proven, low-risk, and available today. Every example cited above is a real client outcome, not a projection. If you’re not sure which of these apply to your stack, our why onboarding automation projects fail post covers the most common reason teams stall before they start.

According to SHRM’s research on onboarding, a structured onboarding process improves new hire retention significantly, and manual, inconsistent onboarding is a direct driver of early turnover. Harvard Business Review has documented the same pattern: the first 90 days set the tone for tenure, and administrative friction in that window is one of the most controllable variables an employer has. The McKinsey research on people management puts a number on the underlying math: 10 minutes a day of avoidable admin work adds up to a full week of lost productivity per employee per year. Multiply that across every new hire your company brings on, and the case for automating these 9 tasks stops being a nice-to-have.

Still doing any of these by hand? Start with the task carrying the highest risk — usually ATS-to-HRIS data entry — and work down the list. Check our onboarding automation FAQ for answers to the questions that come up most when teams start this work.