How founders and CEOs can save time by delegating onboarding tasks
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Growing your team is exciting, and one of the highlights is introducing them to your team, company, and culture. You know how valuable those first experiences are, but being involved in every step of the onboarding process is taking you away from your main work.
The reality is that you can be involved with onboarding without it taking up so much of your time, and without hiring someone to handle it for you — you just need the right platform. We’ll show you how Charlie can help you create a better onboarding experience for everyone.
The cost of doing it all by yourself
Being part of the onboarding process is rewarding, but there’s a very real cost of doing it all yourself. Our research has identified five key challenges that DIY onboarding brings. Do these situations feel familiar?
1. Not focusing on growth
As the CEO or leader, your role is to grow your business. You’re at your best when you’re innovating, building relationships, and securing investment. If you’re stuck handling admin tasks all day, it becomes almost impossible to find the space to think or act strategically about the future.
What this looks like in reality:
- Missing deadlines to apply for funding or growth opportunities
- Spending hours on admin instead of strategic planning
- Not having the time to attend networking events
Potential cost: Business growth -20%
2. Inconsistent onboarding experiences
Every new employee should have a positive onboarding experience, but if you’re handling every journey manually there are bound to be inconsistencies. When the onboarding experience isn’t as expected it creates disappointment, a lack of security, and confusion. In the worst cases, you’ll lose the employee and any reputational damage could make it harder to attract new ones.
What this looks like in reality:
- Some employees get a better onboarding experience than others
- Lower employee retention rates
- Difficulty attracting high quality candidates in the future
Potential cost: Business growth -15%
3. Increased errors
The onboarding process is filled with forms, admin, and numbers. Get any of these elements wrong and it can cause damage to your reputation, and some mistakes are bigger than others — like GDPR breaches, submitting the wrong payroll or benefits information, or missing an important compliance step.
What this looks like in reality:
- Extra time spent fixing errors and mistakes
- Damage to your reputation
- Losing key team members due to repeated errors
Potential cost: Error rate +5%
4. Too many tasks on your plate
When you’re at the centre of the onboarding process, it’s you that everyone looks to for help. Not only are you completing paperwork, but you’re also the go-to person for queries and support. You end up becoming a bottleneck and making little progress on either your CEO tasks or the HR admin.
What this looks like in reality:
- Not being able to focus on tasks that make a difference
- Making costly mistakes
- Experiencing burnout and being forced to take sick leave
Potential cost: Productivity -20%, Sick leave +10%
5. No ability to scale as your business grows
Onboarding one new team member occasionally is a small challenge, but when you’re facing a period of growth the amount of hiring can cause the entire system to crumble. Manual onboarding processes are hard to scale, and require a huge amount of your time and energy at a time when you should be focused on the future.
What this looks like in reality:
- Inefficient processes and disappointing experiences
- Becoming overwhelmed with the amount of admin tasks
- Avoiding growth because of the HR admin you’ll need to complete
Potential cost: Business growth -10%
James Gill at GoSquared
“No one wins when I am spending hours on admin tasks every week. With Charlie, I get more time back in my day to focus on what I love — working closely with the team to help them grow.”
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Understanding your impact on onboarding vs. other work
There’s a lot you could be spending your time on as a leader, but what should you focus on? If onboarding is taking up too much of your time, it’s likely because it shouldn’t be your priority. It’s time to understand where you make the biggest impact, and adjust your approach to onboarding to match.
To do this, we’ll use the ICE framework. This framework helps you prioritise work and decide what to spend your time on. As a CEO your time is limited and you’re pulled in different directions, so it’s important to be able to prioritise.
We’ll take some typical tasks across both HR and revenue generation, then score them between 1-10 (with 10 being highest) in these areas:
-
Impact: How big is the impact on the business or our KPIs?
- Confidence: How sure am I that this is going to work, or that I can succeed at this task?
- Ease: How easy is this task to complete?
Finally, we’ll multiply the scores to give us a final total. Tasks with a high score should be prioritised, while those with a lower score should be delegated to another individual or automated by software.
HR onboarding tasks
Let’s take a look at some common HR admin scenarios and see what your impact as a CEO might be.
- Task
- Complete new employee paperwork
- Impact
- 2
- Confidence
- 3
- Ease
- 5
- Score
- 30
- Task
- Add employee to HR systems
- Impact
- 1
- Confidence
- 3
- Ease
- 7
- Score
- 28
- Task
- Build an onboarding workflow
- Impact
- 2
- Confidence
- 2
- Ease
- 3
- Score
- 12
- Task
- Create an onboarding welcome pack
- Impact
- 2
- Confidence
- 2
- Ease
- 5
- Score
- 20
- Task
- Introduce team members
- Impact
- 1
- Confidence
- 4
- Ease
- 8
- Score
- 32
- Task
- Act as a buddy
- Impact
- 1
- Confidence
- 2
- Ease
- 5
- Score
- 10
Revenue-generating activities
We can see the outcome of spending your time on HR tasks, but what about when you’re working in your zone of genius on revenue-generating activities?
- Task
- Create or update the business plan
- Impact
- 8
- Confidence
- 9
- Ease
- 7
- Score
- 504
- Task
- Build strategic partnerships
- Impact
- 9
- Confidence
- 8
- Ease
- 6
- Score
- 432
- Task
- Advise on product development
- Impact
- 8
- Confidence
- 8
- Ease
- 8
- Score
- 384
- Task
- Approach potential high-value customers
- Impact
- 9
- Confidence
- 6
- Ease
- 8
- Score
- 432
- Task
- Pitch for new opportunities
- Impact
- 10
- Confidence
- 6
- Ease
- 6
- Score
- 360
- Task
- Analyse sales and marketing results
- Impact
- 8
- Confidence
- 8
- Ease
- 6
- Score
- 384
There’s a massive difference between the ICE scores for HR admin tasks and revenue-generating activities. While there’s no doubt that the onboarding experience is essential and valuable, these tasks should be given to someone that can excel at them — leaving you more time to do what you do best.
How to delegate onboarding effectively with Charlie
The idea of handing off most of your onboarding process to someone else or technology can feel overwhelming, but we’ve designed Charlie to be easy to use — even if it’s your first time using HR software.
Here’s how you can use Charlie to delegate onboarding tasks and improve the experience for you and your new team members.
1. Save time with a simple set up
Onboarding new hires is easy with Charlie. All you need to do is invite them to the platform, fill in some key information, and they can then handle the rest.
With self-service access, new hires can complete their own employee profiles and submit the paperwork you need. When everything’s ready, review their submissions, and use customisable onboarding slides to give them a warm welcome.
Learn more: How to add a new team member
2. Delegate but keep it under control
With more than just you handling onboarding, it’s helpful to be able to set different roles and permissions. This makes it easier to delegate access to an employee or contractor, while retaining top-level access for just yourself.
Charlie’s user settings and permissions gives you the flexibility to adjust access to match your business needs. You can make some or all of the information available, depending on everyone’s role within the process.
Learn more: Setting roles and permissions
3. Cover all the basics with onboarding checklists
Consistency is the goal, and onboarding checklists allow you and the rest of your team to make sure every item gets completed on time — leading to the best possible onboarding experience.
With Charlie you can create tasks and build your own repeatable checklists. Add a due date, and tag team members to assign responsibilities. Everyone is accountable for their tasks, and there’s no confusion over who is handling what.
4. Let your processes run in the background
When it’s your job to remember every task within the onboarding journey, you’re bound to make mistakes. Let the platform take care of tasks and reminders, so you can focus your attention on more important matters.
Encourage people to fill in their own information with self-serve access. Set reminders for important dates like check-ins or probation reviews. Let technology automate these tasks so they don’t get forgotten.
5. Automate essential onboarding communications
It’s easy for documents to get lost or tasks to get forgotten when everything is handled by personal emails. Automate communications to ensure you complete your onboarding checklist thoroughly, while saving you time and energy.
Charlie makes it easy for you to send invites to new hires directly within the platform. Employees get reminders of their onboarding tasks by email, and it’s also highly visible on their dashboard. There’s no need for you to manually collect data and documents — they’ll be prompted to enter this onto the platform themselves.
How much could you actually save?
Delegating your onboarding doesn’t just save you time, it also saves you a considerable amount of money. Let’s compare how much it costs for the average small business CEO to handle onboarding vs. a HR software platform like Charlie.
- Task
- Time Spent on Onboarding per Employee
- CEO Doing Onboarding
- 5-10 hours per employee (assuming 1 or 2 days of involvement for a new hire, fractional hours, for just admin)
- Using HR Software (e.g., CharlieHR)
- Automated process, typically 1-2 hours to set up initial onboarding workflows and monitor
- Task
- CEO's Hourly Rate
- CEO Doing Onboarding
- £100 - £300 per hour (depending on the industry and location)
- Using HR Software (e.g., CharlieHR)
- N/A (HR software is a fixed cost)
- Task
- Total Cost per Employee (CEO Time)
- CEO Doing Onboarding
- £500 - £3,000 (5 to 10 hours at CEO rate)
- Using HR Software (e.g., CharlieHR)
- N/A (automation handles this)
- Task
- HR Software Monthly Subscription
- CEO Doing Onboarding
- N/A
- Using HR Software (e.g., CharlieHR)
- £20 - £300 per month (up to 100 employees, brackets pricing)
- Task
- Time Savings (vs CEO doing onboarding)
- CEO Doing Onboarding
- N/A
- Using HR Software (e.g., CharlieHR)
- Saves 5-10 hours per employee per onboarding cycle
- Task
- Additional Benefits (e.g., Task Automation, Reporting, etc.)
- CEO Doing Onboarding
- N/A
- Using HR Software (e.g., CharlieHR)
- Full onboarding workflows, reporting, and automated reminders reduce manual errors, and ensure compliance
- Task
- Long-Term Costs
- CEO Doing Onboarding
- High due to time commitment of CEO
- Using HR Software (e.g., CharlieHR)
- Lower due to scalability; costs stay predictable as the team grows
Let’s take a look at a scenario. Imagine a CEO spends 5 hours onboarding per employee, and they hire 5 new employees in a month to support growth. They now have 20 team members in total.
- Cost for CEO’s time: £100 per hour x 5 hours = £500 per hire
- Total for 5 hires: £500 x 5 = £2,500
To compare, a subscription to Charlie would cost just £100 per month in total for a team of that size.
Hear from Charlie customers who are using our onboarding feature
When Sophie started at London Nootropics, HR processes were manual, scattered, and there was a lot of duplication. It quickly became apparent they needed a new way to manage HR — including onboarding. Without a dedicated HR person, it was important that their software of choice didn’t steal time away from their main areas of work.
Sophie Hanman, Customer Happiness Manager at London Nootropics
“I really recommend Charlie when it comes to having more time to focus on your day-to-day role. I’m not a full-time HR person, but it’s been so easy to take care of HR tasks with Charlie.”
Read case study
Rachel Carrell, Founder & CEO at Koru Kids
“We were a very small and scrappy startup before using Charlie, and the software has put us in such a stronger place to hire and grow.”
These are the words of Rachel Carrell, Founder & CEO at Koru Kids. When hiring a new team member, they needed somewhere where they could store an employee handbook and process a visa sponsorship correctly. Charlie gave them a secure, easy-to-use platform for onboarding.
Rachel Carrell, Founder & CEO at Koru Kids
“Without Charlie, it would have taken us 10 times the time and effort to do it, without a guarantee for 100% compliance.”
Read case study
Get back your time and focus with Charlie
Being so involved in your onboarding workflow creates bottlenecks, costs you valuable time, and ends up costing your business money. Switch to Charlie and not only do you regain your focus for revenue-generating work, but you can also create a more rewarding onboarding experience for all.
To get started, book a demo with our sales team. They’ll show you the platform and go through Charlie can help you streamline your onboarding process, and introduce other features you might find useful too — like time-off management and performance reviews. After that, enjoy a no-commitment free trial, followed by a simple signup process when you’re ready to get started.
Kick off onboarding today
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Written by:
Jenny Tattum
Jenny is a Senior Product Manager at CharlieHR. She has years of experience with product planning and development, and user research too – she put together this guide by collecting data and information on competitors so we could improve our product and tailor it to small business owners.
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FAQs for Charlie’s onboarding feature
Explore some of the most commonly asked questions about onboarding with Charlie.
Delegating your onboarding tasks makes practical and financial sense. Your time is limited, and you can make the biggest impact in your business by focusing on revenue-generating tasks. Let Charlie take care of the HR admin so you can lead, nurture, and scale.
When you delegate or automate some of your onboarding process, you don’t have to write yourself out of it completely. Choose which elements of the process you want to be involved with, and automate the parts you don’t. For example, you might want to create your own onboarding slides, or personally welcome new team members in your Slack channel.
Charlie isn’t just for onboarding. For one simple monthly cost, you get access to all our features including time-off management, onboarding, performance reviews, employee engagement, and perks and benefits.
Learn more about Charlie for CEOs, founders, and MDs.
DBS checks are a requirement for some industries and roles. Our InfoVetted integration brings their pre-employment screening experience to Charlie users in a simple, connected way.
Yes! Charlie has plenty of integrations with other HR, payroll, and business tools you might use — including Bonusly, PayCaptain, Workable, and Xero.
We’ve designed Charlie to be easy to use, but if you have any questions our help centre is filled with useful guides on team member onboarding and more. You can also reach out to our friendly support team for help.
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