Designing a Pre-Onboarding Portal to Drive New Hire Success

The WorkRamp LEARNIES Awards celebrate the best and most impactful learning programs powered by WorkRamp. 

In this customer spotlight, we sit down with one of our 2023 LEARNIES winners, Rebeca Marx, People Programs Manager at Intercom, as she shares the catalyst for and process of transforming their pre-onboarding process into a more seamless and enjoyable experience for new hires. 

Creating a New Hire Onboarding Portal

Setting new hires up for success starts with a five-star onboarding experience. 

For Intercom, this involved sending out pre-onboarding resources and required action items in advance. However, with the amount of material that needed to be shared for each new hire persona, pre-onboarding emails were text-heavy and loaded with PDF resources that had to be manually attached. This not only created a lot of work for the team and left a lot of room for human error but also left a lot to be desired for the new hire experience. 

With the goal of reducing manual lift for the onboarding team and more effectively engaging new hires, Rebeca got creative and built Intercom’s New Hire Onboarding Portal using WorkRamp’s Customer Learning Cloud functionality.

Read more: 5 Effective New Hire Onboarding Strategies

Navigating the portal experience 

To direct new hires to the portal, Rebeca updated the People team’s pre-onboarding email templates to include a registration link and outline instructions for completing required onboarding action items. 

At registration, new hires are asked to indicate their location in order to access segmented content that’s relevant to them.

Once inside the portal, they’ll have access to four collections: 

• [Required] First Day Prep: This contains an onboarding FAQ as well as a Preparing-for Your-First-Day guide which is applicable to their location–remote or in-office. This is the most crucial guide, as it references the various resources available in the portal and contains a checklist of pre-onboarding tasks for new hires to complete before moving on
• Our Offices: This contains overview resources for each Intercom office, including information on how to access the space on their first day
• Benefits & Perks: This includes benefits information sorted by their country of residence 
• Onboarding Schedules: This includes high-level overview resources of the schedule for each region (NAMER, EMEA, and APAC)

Recruiting and management teams were also given access to the portal to increase visibility into what information is being shared before new hires start.

Read more: 6 Best Practices for New Employee Training & Onboarding

Program results and impact

Since launching in August 2023, the Intercom team has onboarded 174 new hires through the portal. As a result, they’ve achieved: 

• Significantly reduced number of pre-onboarding questions for the People team 
• Delivery of targeted content by location and other new hire personas so that new hires see information that is relevant to them, such as how to access a particular office
• Reduction in time, effort, and human error for the People Ops and People Programs teams by removing manual processes
• Improved visibility for new hires into what their onboarding experience will entail from the moment they sign their offer and are hired into Workday, which reduces the ambiguity and anxiety that might come from not knowing what action is required or what to expect
• Better transparency for recruiting and hiring managers into what information is shared with new hires prior to their start date

Read more: Transform New Hires Into Top Performers

The team also received feedback from several new hires, stating that the portal is informative, engaging, and enjoyable. This has been validated by their week-one onboarding survey, which shows a 98 percent positive rating for “The information and instructions provided to me before my first day were clear.”

“The New Hire Onboarding Portal has been a huge game-changer for our teams,” says Rebeca. “Pre-onboarding is no longer something we have to actively think about since the portal does the work for us and requires little maintenance.”

Congratulations to Rebeca and the Intercom team for building such an impactful New Hire Onboarding Portal on the Customer Learning Cloud and winning The Oscar LEARNIES Award! For opportunities to join an organization that prioritizes employee success from the start, check out Intercom careers. 

Looking to build an onboarding experience that engages from day one? Chat with our team to learn more about how the Learning Cloud can help.