People
Onboarding that is finished before the first Monday
Nobody's first day should start with an apology about accounts. A worker runs the pre-start checklist and reports what is not done while there is still time to fix it.
What the worker does
An AI worker in Polaris runs employee onboarding by creating a per-hire checklist from your template, assigning each item to the person who owns it, chasing them in Slack, booking the first-week meetings in Google Calendar, and posting a daily status naming what is still outstanding. IT access, contracts and pay are actioned by the humans who own those systems, not by the worker.
- Connections
- Slack · Google Calendar · Gmail
- Starts
- When the start date is confirmed
- Reports
- Daily until every item is closed
Onboarding fails in the gap between eight owners
The checklist is not the problem. Almost every company has one. The problem is that finishing it needs IT, finance, the hiring manager, an office lead and whoever administers each tool, and none of them owns the outcome. Each does their bit when they see the message.
So on Monday the laptop is there but the email is not, or the email is there but nobody booked the manager's first one-to-one, and the new hire spends day one watching people apologise.
A worker is a reasonable owner of the chase precisely because chasing eight busy people every day is a job no human wants and no human is good at.
How an onboarding run works
- 1
Keep the template as a doc, not in someone's head
Docs in Polaris are a nested tree with to-dos and sub-pages, and they are versioned. The onboarding template lives there and gets better every time someone finds a gap.
- 2
Create the hire as a workstream
One workstream per hire keeps the thread in one place: the checklist, the questions, the week-one plan and the delivery comments.
- 3
Assign the worker and give it Slack and Calendar
Slack so it can chase item owners where they already are, Calendar so it can put the week-one meetings in before the diary fills up.
- 4
Set acceptance criteria with a hard date
For example: every item has a named owner; anything not confirmed by two working days before the start date is escalated to the hiring manager; the week-one calendar is booked and accepted.
- 5
Read the daily status and unblock
The worker posts what is outstanding and who it is waiting on. A human closes the task once the new starter is actually set up.
Items a worker can genuinely own versus items it can only chase
Can own: the week-one calendar
Booking the manager one-to-one, the team intro and the first review point across real calendars, and rebooking when someone declines.
Can own: the welcome pack
Assembling the docs the new starter needs into one place, and checking the links in them still resolve.
Can own: the status
Knowing, every morning, exactly which of the twenty-two items are done and which are not.
Can only chase: account creation
Creating accounts in your identity provider is an IT action in an IT system. The worker asks, reminds and escalates. It does not provision.
Must not touch: contract and pay
Employment paperwork and payroll are human actions with legal consequences, handled outside Polaris by the people who own them.
A first-week plan the worker can assemble
The specifics are yours. This is the shape it fills in from your template.
| When | What the worker sets up | Who owns it on the day |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1, morning | Manager one-to-one booked, welcome doc assembled | Hiring manager |
| Day 1, afternoon | Team introduction slot, access checklist confirmation | Team lead |
| Day 2 | Tooling walkthrough booked with whoever administers each tool | Tool owners |
| Day 3–4 | First real task drafted into the hire's Focus lane | Hiring manager |
| Day 5 | End-of-week check-in booked, plus a written prompt asking what was missing | Hiring manager |
| Day 30 | Review point already in the calendar | Hiring manager |
Questions people ask
+Can the worker create accounts in our tools?
No. The connection catalog is fixed and contains no identity or device-management system. The worker chases the human who provisions accounts and reports whether it is done, which is the part that actually slips.
+Does the new hire get a Polaris account?
If you want one. Polaris is free for unlimited humans with no seat cost, and sign-in is passwordless: an email address, then a code sent to it. There is no password to issue or reset.
+What if we hire in batches?
One workstream per hire, one worker running all of them. The status comment names each hire separately so a stalled item on one person does not disappear into a batch summary.
+Can it handle offboarding too?
The same pattern works: a checklist, named owners, a chase and a daily status. Be stricter about the boundary, since offboarding touches access revocation and final pay, both of which are human actions in systems the worker cannot reach.
Related
HR work an AI worker can prepare, and where it must stop
Scheduling, onboarding logistics, policy drafts and review-cycle admin, prepared by a worker. Every decision about a person stays with a person.
Interview scheduling, including the reschedules
Four calendars, two time zones, a candidate who can only do early mornings, and a panellist who declines twice. This is the job.
Policy documents that stay current and show their changes
A policy nobody has updated in three years is worse than no policy. A worker keeps the drafts moving and the versions visible. A qualified adviser signs them off.
Finding where the SOP and the real procedure came apart
Every written procedure starts accurate and drifts. A worker compares the document to how the work actually ran and reports the difference.
Hire an AI executive assistant
Every commitment made in a meeting becomes a task with a name and a date on it before the next meeting starts.
Connect Slack to Polaris
Six scopes, no access to direct messages, and a bot that only reads the channels somebody invited it into.
Connect Google Calendar to Polaris
Scheduling is the one thing an assistant is asked for first, and it is the one connection still waiting on Google sign-in.
Workstream
A strand of work that keeps going, rather than a project that ends.