How to Build a Custom Onboarding Checklist Automation for New Hires with Make.com

Streamlining the new hire onboarding process is crucial for efficiency, compliance, and creating a positive first impression. Manual checklists are prone to error, take up valuable HR time, and often lead to inconsistencies. This guide will walk you through building a robust, automated onboarding checklist using Make.com, ensuring every new team member receives a consistent, compliant, and engaging experience from day one. By leveraging Make.com’s powerful integration capabilities, you can connect your existing HRIS, communication tools, and task management systems to create a seamless automation flow that saves countless hours and reduces administrative burden.

Step 1: Define Your Onboarding Objectives and Process Flow

Before diving into Make.com, meticulously map out your current onboarding process and identify all key stakeholders, tasks, and necessary documents. What needs to happen before day one, on day one, and within the first week or month? Consider tasks like IT setup, HR paperwork, welcome emails, departmental introductions, training assignments, and access provisioning. Clearly define who is responsible for each item and what triggers the next step. Understanding this flow is paramount, as it forms the blueprint for your Make.com scenario. Think about the specific data points you’ll need from your HRIS (e.g., employee name, start date, department, manager) and how they will populate your automated tasks. This initial planning phase, often overlooked, is the most critical for a successful automation.

Step 2: Set Up Your Make.com Trigger (New Hire Event)

Your automation needs a starting point. This will typically be a new hire record being created or updated in your HR Information System (HRIS), Applicant Tracking System (ATS), or even a simple Google Sheet if you’re starting small. In Make.com, choose the appropriate app module as your trigger. For example, if you use BambooHR, select “Watch New Employees” or “Watch Updated Employees.” If you’re using a custom system, a webhook is an excellent choice. Configure the trigger to listen for the specific event that signifies a new hire is ready for onboarding. Test this trigger thoroughly by adding a dummy new hire record to ensure Make.com correctly receives the data, capturing all necessary employee details that will drive subsequent checklist items.

Step 3: Structure Your Onboarding Checklist Data

To keep your checklist dynamic and easily maintainable, store your checklist items in a structured format outside of Make.com itself. A Google Sheet, Airtable base, or even a database like MySQL can serve this purpose. Each row in your chosen data source can represent a checklist item, with columns for: Task Name, Description, Assigned To (e.g., HR, IT, Manager), Due Date Offset (e.g., “Start Date + 3 Days”), and Department-specific tags. Make.com can then read from this central source. This approach allows you to update, add, or remove checklist items without modifying your Make.com scenario, providing immense flexibility and scalability as your onboarding process evolves. This centralized data source is a cornerstone of a truly maintainable automation.

Step 4: Generate and Assign Onboarding Tasks

Now, connect your structured checklist data to your task management system. After Make.com is triggered by a new hire event, add a module to retrieve all relevant checklist items from your Google Sheet or Airtable (Step 3). Then, use an iterator to process each item. For each item, create a task in your preferred project management tool like Asana, ClickUp, or Trello, dynamically populating the task name, description, and assignee using data from your checklist source and the new hire details. Use the “Due Date Offset” to calculate the actual due date relative to the employee’s start date. This ensures tasks are assigned automatically to the correct individuals with precise deadlines, eliminating manual task creation and potential oversights.

Step 5: Automate Communication and Notifications

Effective communication is key to a smooth onboarding experience. Beyond task assignment, use Make.com to send automated welcome emails to the new hire, their manager, and relevant team members. Integrate with your email client (e.g., Gmail, Outlook 365) or an email marketing platform (e.g., Mailchimp, Keap). Send internal Slack or Microsoft Teams notifications to relevant departments (IT, HR, Manager) when specific tasks are created or completed. You can also configure reminders for overdue tasks. Personalize these communications using the new hire’s name, start date, and other relevant details pulled from your HRIS. This proactive communication ensures everyone is informed, accountable, and ready to support the new hire’s integration into the company culture.

Step 6: Implement Progress Tracking and Reporting

A fully automated onboarding system isn’t complete without the ability to track progress and generate reports. As tasks are completed in your project management system, Make.com can listen for these updates. Configure modules to update your central checklist data source (Google Sheet/Airtable) with completion dates or status changes. You can also build a separate scenario to compile weekly or monthly reports on onboarding progress, identifying bottlenecks or areas for improvement. This data-driven approach allows HR and operations leaders to gain insights into the efficiency of their onboarding process, ensure compliance, and continuously optimize the new hire experience, turning what was once a manual burden into a strategic advantage.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: The Automated Recruiter’s 2025 Verdict: Make.com vs Zapier for Hyper-Automation