Staff onboarding.

The gap between "we've hired her" and "she taught her first lesson" is where good onboarding lives — and where most schools drop things. The contract is signed but the ID never gets copied; the email account is promised but not created; orientation happens in a corridor conversation nobody remembers. Staff onboarding in YESS closes that gap with a checklist that starts itself and is worked to completion.

One clarification up front, because the word is overloaded. This book is about staff onboarding — the HR new-hire checklist at /dashboard/onboarding. It is not the same thing as the school's own signup wizard (the tenant onboarding that stands a new school up on the platform). Different feature, different place; this one is about the people you hire.

A first day that runs on a list, not on memory.

Onboarding starts from a template — a named, reusable checklist a school builds once and applies to every hire of a given kind. Templates are created from /dashboard/onboarding and carry a name, a description, a staff type, and a list of tasks.

Staff type

A template is scoped to a staff type — teaching, non-teaching, administrative, support, or all — so a teacher and a bursar can get different first-week lists. When a hire needs a checklist, the platform picks the active template whose staff type matches, and falls back to an all template if there is no exact match.

Five task categories

Each task on a template carries a title and one of five categories, so a checklist reads as a coherent first week rather than a flat to-do list:

• Documents — ID, qualifications, references, signed paperwork.
• IT setup — email account, system access, devices.
• Orientation — the campus tour, the introductions, the lay of the land.
• Training — role-specific and platform training.
• Compliance — the handbook, the policies, the safeguarding sign-offs.

Each task is also marked required or optional — a distinction that matters when the checklist decides it is finished (Chapter three).

A template is the pattern; a checklist instance is the one that belongs to a specific new hire. YESS creates instances two ways.

The auto-spawn is idempotent — a person only ever gets one checklist, even though a recruitment hire touches the staff record and the application in quick succession. The built-in fallback covers the essentials every school shares: sign the contract, collect ID and qualifications, provision email and system access, the campus orientation, read the handbook, and role-specific training.

Each checklist instance is a card on the onboarding screen, grouped into in-progress and completed. Expanding a card shows every task with its category; ticking a task stamps it complete with the time and the person who ticked it, and the card's progress bar fills.

The checklist finishes cleverly: an instance flips to completed once every required task is done — optional tasks left open do not hold it back. An instance moves through just three states: in progress, completed, or cancelled. The screen's headline tiles roll the instances up into the numbers HR actually watches — how many onboardings are active, how many are complete, how many templates exist, and the average completion across everyone in flight.

It is worth being exact about what onboarding is. It is a tracking tool — a reliable, auto-starting record that the right steps happened — not an executionengine that performs them for you.

Concretely: the "provision email and system access" task is a checkbox you tick once you have created the account — onboarding does not itself create a login, assign a role, or hand over credentials. Account creation and role assignment happen in the platform's user and roles area; the checklist is where you record that they were done. Reading onboarding as "the list that makes sure nothing is forgotten" is exactly right; reading it as "the robot that sets up the new hire's account" overstates what is built today.

The onboarding loop — template, auto or manual instance, task completion, KPIs — is genuinely wired end to end. What is scaffolded but not finished sits around the edges, and is named here plainly.

Onboarding is the entry ramp of the employment relationship. It is triggered by hiring, records the account the platform provisions, and mirrors the exit that offboarding handles.