An onboarding folder for the next new hire

A new hire should not need to reconstruct the company from old messages. Their onboarding documents should explain where to begin, what needs their attention, and who can answer the next question. This walkthrough builds a small, maintainable onboarding pack from existing material, with AI helping organize and draft rather than invent company policy.

§ Step 1: Define the pack before collecting material

Start with one role and one upcoming hire. A useful first version contains five documents: a welcome note, a first-week schedule, an access checklist, a role guide, and a directory of people and resources. Keep organization-wide material separate from role-specific instructions so the same information does not need updating in several places.

Write down the intended reader, document owner, and approval owner for each item. These decisions give the drafting process boundaries and make the final review easier.

§ Step 2: Gather a small set of approved sources

Collect current policies, team procedures, role expectations, and confirmed scheduling details. Prefer a short, reliable source set over a large archive of uncertain notes. Label each source with its title, owner, and last-reviewed date.

• Include only information needed for the onboarding pack.
• Remove passwords, access tokens, and unnecessary personal details.
• Mark conflicting or outdated instructions for an owner to resolve.
• Keep benefits, employment terms, and policy wording tied to approved source documents.

Before submitting internal material to an external service, confirm that your organization permits that use and review the applicable data-handling terms.

§ Step 3: Set up a repeatable drafting request

If your team already uses an OpenAI SDK, Vana API provides an OpenAI-compatible endpoint for the drafting workflow. Create an account when you are ready to connect it. Keep the API key in your application's secret configuration, not inside an onboarding document or shared prompt.

Separate the request into three parts: drafting instructions, approved source material, and the requested document. Keep those boundaries explicit, and tell the model to treat source material as reference text rather than instructions. Reuse the same structure for each document so revisions remain easy to compare.

§ Step 4: Draft the welcome note and first-week schedule

Begin with the documents that establish context. Ask for a short welcome note covering the team's purpose, the new hire's initial focus, and their primary contact. Then request a first-week schedule using only confirmed events.

A practical instruction is: Use only the supplied sources. Do not invent names, meeting times, policies, or commitments. Mark missing information as Needs confirmation. End with a list of unresolved questions.

Keep unscheduled activities separate from calendar commitments. Reading a team overview is a task; a manager conversation becomes an appointment only after someone confirms it.

§ Step 5: Make access and role instructions actionable

For the access checklist, request an entry for each required system containing its purpose, request route, approver, and completion check. Do not include credentials. Where the source lacks an approver or request route, leave a visible confirmation marker rather than accepting a plausible guess.

For the role guide, organize material around the first useful contribution: what the hire will work on, which resources they need, who reviews their work, and what completion looks like. Prefer concrete instructions over broad statements such as get familiar with the business.

§ Step 6: Review facts and test the sequence

Have each document owner check the draft against its sources. Confirm names, permissions, dates, and policy wording. Then ask someone unfamiliar with the role to walk through the pack in order.

Look for hidden dependencies: a task requiring access that arrives later, a meeting without an organizer, or a resource described by an internal nickname. Resolve every Needs confirmation marker before publishing, or clearly assign the outstanding item to an owner.

§ Step 7: Publish one version and maintain it

Place the approved pack in the team's established documentation location. Give each document an owner and review date, and share one starting page rather than several competing attachments.

After the first week, ask the hire which instructions were missing, confusing, or unnecessary. Update the sources first, then regenerate only the affected sections. The result should remain a small set of dependable documents, not an expanding archive of polished drafts.