A Guide to Setting Up Automated Onboarding Checklists and Reminders in Keap for New Hires

Streamlining the new hire onboarding process is crucial for establishing a positive employee experience from day one, reducing administrative burden, and ensuring compliance. Manual onboarding is often fraught with inefficiencies, forgotten tasks, and a lack of timely communication. By leveraging Keap’s powerful automation capabilities, businesses can transform their onboarding into a seamless, efficient, and error-free system. This guide will walk you through the practical steps to configure automated checklists and reminders in Keap, ensuring every new hire receives a consistent, thorough, and engaging welcome, allowing your team to focus on strategic initiatives rather than repetitive administrative tasks.

Step 1: Define Your Onboarding Stages and Core Tasks

Before diving into Keap, clearly outline your complete onboarding journey. Break it down into distinct stages such as Pre-boarding, Day 1, Week 1, and 30/60/90-day checkpoints. For each stage, list every essential task and required document. This includes paperwork completion, IT setup, team introductions, training modules, and feedback surveys. Identifying these elements upfront ensures no critical step is missed and provides a clear blueprint for your Keap campaign. Consider which tasks are for the new hire, their manager, HR, or IT, as this will influence your automation strategy and the recipients of various reminders and notifications.

Step 2: Design Your Keap Campaign Structure

In Keap, the entire onboarding process will live within a single, comprehensive campaign. Start by creating a new campaign and envision its flow. The initial trigger could be a new hire form submission, an internal tag application (e.g., “New Hire Onboarding Trigger”), or a manual addition to a sequence. Design your campaign to branch out based on roles or departments if your onboarding differs significantly. Each stage you defined in Step 1 should correspond to a sequence within Keap, allowing for logical progression and timed delivery of information and tasks. This modular approach makes the campaign easier to build, manage, and iterate on.

Step 3: Create Keap Onboarding Forms, Tags, and Custom Fields

Within your Keap campaign, build web forms for new hires to complete necessary paperwork or acknowledge receipt of documents. Use custom fields to capture specific new hire data (e.g., start date, department, manager’s name) that can then be merged into emails or used for conditional logic. Crucially, create a system of tags that will dynamically advance new hires through the campaign. For example, a “Pre-boarding Complete” tag could trigger the “Day 1” sequence, while “IT Setup Done” could notify the relevant department. These tags act as your digital checklist, marking progress and automating subsequent actions.

Step 4: Craft Automated Email and SMS Reminders

This is where Keap truly shines in reducing manual effort. Within each campaign sequence, set up automated emails and, where appropriate, SMS messages. These communications will serve multiple purposes: delivering welcome messages, sharing essential documents, providing links to training resources, and, most importantly, sending reminders for pending tasks. Schedule these messages to be delivered at specific intervals relative to the new hire’s start date or upon the application of a specific tag. Personalize these messages using custom fields to create a more engaging and relevant experience for the new hire.

Step 5: Implement Internal Notifications and Task Assignments

Onboarding is a team effort. Keap allows you to automate internal notifications to relevant team members (managers, IT, HR) when specific milestones are met or tasks are due. Use Keap’s internal forms or task assignments to prompt actions from your team, such as “Order New Laptop,” “Schedule Welcome Meeting,” or “Complete Background Check.” These tasks can be assigned directly within the campaign, ensuring accountability and timely completion. Setting up email or SMS alerts for these internal tasks ensures that everyone involved knows their role and when they need to act, preventing delays and bottlenecks.

Step 6: Test, Refine, and Launch Your Onboarding Flow

Before fully deploying your automated onboarding campaign, rigorous testing is essential. Run through the entire process as if you were a new hire, a manager, and an HR administrator. Check all forms, tags, custom fields, email content, and timing of sequences. Ensure all internal notifications are routing correctly and tasks are assigned to the right people. Gather feedback from stakeholders and make necessary adjustments. A smooth initial experience sets the tone for future efficiency. Once thoroughly tested and refined, activate your campaign, ready to provide an exceptional onboarding experience for every new hire.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Keap Automation Consulting: Your Blueprint for Future-Proof Talent Management