A new starter touches three or four teams before their first morning. This walkthrough sets up an employee onboarding form in FormWork for Calder Valley Housing, a fictional housing association: the hiring manager submits it, then HR, IT and facilities each work their part in turn, with reminders counted back from the start date. It is a configuration pattern, not a customer case study, and it doesn’t replace your HR system.
Why new starter onboarding slips
The usual version is an email from the hiring manager, forwarded to IT and facilities, and a spreadsheet one person keeps up to date. Requests arrive without a start date, IT hears about a laptop the day before, and nobody can say whose turn it is. The aim here is one entry per starter, a clear owner at each step, and a warning while there is still time to act.
Build the employee onboarding form
The hiring manager fills in a short form with three pages:
- The new starter: Name, job title, department, a required Start date (a Date field), contract type and working pattern (Office, Hybrid or Remote). A fixed-term contract shows an End date through conditional logic.
- Equipment and access: an Equipment repeating group with an item, quantity and note per row. The item is a Dropdown with options from a data table, so IT can retire a laptop model without anyone publishing the form. A Multiple choice lists the systems needed. Remote starters skip the desk question and give a delivery Address instead.
- First day: arrival time, a buddy, notes for facilities, and the hiring manager’s name and Email.
Collect only what the three teams need. Keep bank details, salary, right-to-work documents and health information in your HR system (see who can see each starter).
Give HR, IT and facilities their own stages
Create a group for each team in Account settings > Team, then set up these stages on the form’s Process tab:
| Stage | Kind | Owner | Due | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HR checks | Open | The HR group | Within 2 days | Send to IT (people in the HR group), Withdraw |
| IT setup | Open | The IT group | Within 3 days | Send to facilities (the owner), Back to HR (comment required), Withdraw |
| Facilities | Open | The Facilities group | Within 2 days | Ready for first day, Withdraw |
| First day | Open | The person in the Hiring manager team field | No due time | Mark as done (the owner) |
| Done, Withdrawn | Closed | None | None |
Withdraw is limited to people in the HR group, asks for a comment and has the confirmation question “Withdraw this starter?”, for offers that fall through.
Add team fields for what each team records: Hiring manager (a Team member field that HR fills in during its checks), HR reference, laptop asset tag and building pass status. If nobody fills in the hiring manager, nobody owns the entry at First day, so make it part of HR’s checks.
An entry is in one stage at a time, with one owner, so the teams work in sequence, not in parallel. If facilities needs a head start on a building pass, email them when the entry reaches IT setup and let them update the Building pass team field while IT works. The entry still shows IT as the owner until it moves on.
Give each team its own queue in My work
Each person sees their team’s starters in My work: under In my groups (unassigned) until someone selects Assign to me, then under Assigned to me, with overdue entries first. On the entries table, save a view per team with the start date as a column.
For IT, an Assign step shares each new setup to the Next in a group, skipping people marked as away. If nobody can take it, the step fails and the entry stays with the IT group.
Due times and the start date
Stage due times count from when an entry enters the stage, in hours, days or weeks of calendar time, so weekends count. They can’t be set relative to an answer, so IT setup can’t be “due 3 days before the start date”. See owners and due dates.
So this setup uses two clocks:
- Stage due times say how long each team has once it is their turn. Late work shows as overdue in red and turns the My work badge red.
- The Before or after a date answer trigger watches the start date. It runs a set number of days or hours before or after it, at a time of day you choose, once per entry and date, and again if HR corrects the date with Edit answers.
Plan for its limits. Its days are calendar days, so “3 days before” a Monday start is the Friday. It runs whatever stage the entry is in, so check the stage in the steps. And an entry submitted after its reminder time has passed doesn’t get that reminder, which matters for short-notice starters.
FormWork doesn’t email anyone when an entry is assigned or becomes overdue unless an automation does it.
Automations for each hand-off
| Automation | When | Steps |
|---|---|---|
| Share out IT setup | Stage changes, to IT setup | Assign: next in the IT group |
| Tell the next team | Stage changes, to IT setup or Facilities | Switch on the new stage, then Send email to that team’s shared inbox with a link to the entry |
| Start date check | Before or after a date answer: Start date, 5 days before, at 09:00 | Switch on the stage name: for HR checks, IT setup or Facilities, Send email to that team and the hiring manager. Otherwise nothing |
| First day briefing | Before or after a date answer: Start date, 1 day before, at 15:00 | Send email to the Hiring manager team field with the arrival time, buddy and equipment |
| Chase overdue setups | In a stage too long: IT setup, longer than 3 days | Send email to the IT team’s inbox, naming the owner |
To open service desk tickets, add Send to webhook to the IT setup automation, inside a For each over the equipment group if each item needs its own. A stage move doesn’t prove the request worked, so turn on Email admins when an automation run fails and check runs.
Keep the hiring manager informed
Turn on two notifications: Email your team to the HR inbox for each submission, and Email the person who filled it in to the hiring manager’s email answer.
With respondent status on, the confirmation gets a See progress link to a read-only page showing labels such as “With HR”, “Accounts and equipment being set up” and “Ready for the first day”, never your notes or answers.
Who can see each starter
Everyone in a FormWork account can open every entry, whichever group owns it. Groups decide who owns work, not who can see it, and team fields are hidden from respondents, not from colleagues. IT and facilities will see everything on the form, which is why it leaves out salary and sensitive personal data. Hiring managers who own the First day stage need to be in the account, and can then see every other starter. Review team members and roles before you invite people.
Test these cases before you publish
- A starter whose start date is less than 5 days away when submitted: no start date check will run.
- HR moves the start date: the date automations run again for the new date.
- An empty Hiring manager team field at First day: nobody owns the entry.
- Every IT team member marked as away: the Assign step fails.
- Back to HR from IT setup, then Send to IT again: the due time starts afresh and Assign may pick someone else.
- An offer withdrawn at Facilities: the entry closes, and the start date check skips it.
- A failed service desk webhook, and the admin email it sends.
Change it safely
Publish changes as a new form version. Submitted starters keep the questions they answered, while stages and automations follow the latest version. If you change a stage’s due time, the publish review asks whether to apply it to starters already in that stage. Changing a date trigger’s timing makes it run again for starters whose new reminder is still ahead. See drafts and publishing.
What success looks like
A starter is ready when the entry has reached First day before the start date, the hiring manager has had the briefing, and the hiring manager has selected Mark as done after the first day. Set your own targets for notice periods and turnaround; this walkthrough doesn’t claim a measured improvement.
For a client-facing version, see client onboarding. For extra kit that needs budget approval, see purchase approvals. Read about processes and automations, compare pricing, or talk through your onboarding.