Dan Dorato-Hankins, Chief Technology Officer at Vector Media, knew he had a problem on his hands.
New employee onboarding at Vector, the largest transit ad company in the U.S. (think billboards, advertisements on the sides of buses, experiential marketing, and more), was clunky. It was slower than an express bus taking the local route in rush hour on the Friday before a holiday weekend.
Not only was onboarding a poor experience for new employees, but it was tedious for members of the PeopleOps team. Onboarding had become a drag on the business.
As an automation expert, Dan knew Vector could streamline onboarding with a modern solution. There was too much at stake not to find a fix. After all, ensuring new employees can smoothly step into their roles isn't just a nice-to-have—it's a must. When onboarding is seamless, employees can hit the ground running with an understanding of the basics and a feeling of belonging.
In fact, newbies who go through effective onboarding are up to 18 times more committed to their workplace. That commitment isn't just a warm, fuzzy feeling, either. It translates to better retention, a happier culture, and a serious boost in overall productivity.
At Vector, teams widely use Zapier to take simple tasks off their to-do lists. But Dan wanted teams beyond IT to imagine a world where entire processes could operate almost completely on their own.
One team that had many manual, repetitive tasks was PeopleOps. At Vector, they oversee anything that impacts human resources and talent, including employee onboarding.
The employee onboarding process is an ongoing necessity but is continually expanding in complexity, detail, and time requirements as they hire more staff. This was a problem Vector needed to solve quickly because it was only going to get worse.
For each new employee, PeopleOps spent up to an hour manually setting up accounts, sharing documents, generating passwords, and assigning hardware. In total, the process was almost 30 steps. Given all the intricacies, it wasn't uncommon for a step to slip through the cracks. Then PeopleOps had to field emails from new employees seeking guidance on missing items.
New employees often felt a bit lost, and PeopleOps used the precious time they had on manual tasks instead of welcoming staff. It was a lose-lose situation.
To take this litany of onboarding tasks off the plate of PeopleOps, Dan and his team leaned on Zapier's suite of tools to build a custom workflow.
“We set up a Zap that’s a 29-step conditional flow that handles the entire employee onboarding process and is powered by a dashboard that lives in Zapier Tables,” he said.
“As soon as the employee signs their handbook, the data is transferred to Zapier Tables. Our team then just makes sure their name is spelled correctly and hits the ‘process’ button [in the Table], and away it goes.”
The workflow creates the new employee’s passwords, gives them access to software, sends them emails, and even assigns them hardware like a laptop.
The Tables dashboard where PeopleOps begins the process also creates visibility into where each employee is in the flow. Now, if a team member is on vacation or there’s an issue with onboarding, anyone on PeopleOps can hop in, address it, and not worry about breaking any workflows.
With the process automated, the PeopleOps team at Vector has an hour per new employee back on their calendar. This gives them extra bandwidth to focus on more creative tasks to maintain and improve employee happiness.
Since creating this workflow, the team hasn't received any emails from new employees asking questions about steps in the process. This has removed the frustration and confusion onboarding employees felt in the past.
“Our onboarding process has gotten so much smoother because we never have to worry about someone dropping the ball. It has created layers of redundancy and visibility that weren’t there before. Now, if there is a failure, we can jump on it before the employee that’s being onboarded is even aware,” said Dan.
New automated processes like this one have caught the attention of other team members at Vector. The success of the fully automated onboarding process helped Dan and his six-person IT team demonstrate the power of automation to employees at every level and on every team.
“For me, Zapier was originally the glue to hold all of the pieces together," Dan said. "Now, with new releases like Tables and Interfaces, Zapier is transforming to be the whole toolbox.”
Interested in learning other ways Vector Media is simplifying business-critical processes with automation? Learn more about how the Support team saves 30 minutes per ticket by using OpenAI and Zapier.
