How a new hire's first weeks get tracked in Arche: reusable onboarding templates, the checklist each hire gets from one, and how a checklist starts itself when a candidate is hired.
Overview
Onboarding is built from two record types. A template is a reusable list of tasks: the paperwork, training, equipment, and introductions a new hire and the people around them need to get through. A checklist is one template put to work for one employee: the same tasks, copied over with real due dates and, where possible, a real person assigned to each one.
Onboarding is a licensed module, gated the same way as the rest of recruiting. The two screens live under Recruiting in the sidebar: Onboarding Templates (/onboarding/templates) and Onboarding Checklists (/onboarding/checklists). Both are covered by the recruiting permissions. There's no separate onboarding permission: view_recruiting to see templates and checklists, manage_recruiting to create or change anything.
Templates
A template holds a name, an optional description, an optional department and position it's scoped to, an estimatedDays figure (defaults to 30), and a list of tasks. It also carries two flags:
- Default: a company can have one default template at a time. Marking a template as default automatically un-marks whichever one held that spot before.
- Active: deleting a template doesn't remove it. It flips
isActiveto false instead, so checklists that already used it keep their history, and it drops out of the list you pick from when starting new onboarding.
Template tasks
Each task on a template has:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Title / description | What the task is |
| Category | paperwork, training, equipment, access, introduction, compliance, or other (defaults to other) |
| Assignee type | employee, manager, hr, it, or custom (defaults to hr), who this task belongs to, as a role rather than a named person |
| Due day offset | Days from the hire's start date that the task falls due, e.g. 0 for day one, 7 for the end of week one |
| Required | Whether the task can be skipped later (defaults to required) |
| Sort order | Controls the order tasks appear in; left blank, a new task is placed after the last one |
Tasks are managed from the template detail view: add, edit, or remove them, and reorder with sort order. None of this touches any checklist already built from the template; only new checklists pick up the change.
Starting onboarding for an employee
A checklist gets created one of two ways.
By hand, from the Onboarding Checklists page: pick the employee, a start date, and optionally a template. An employee can only ever have one onboarding checklist. Trying to start a second is rejected. If you pick a template, its tasks are copied onto the checklist immediately: each task's due date is the start date plus its dueDayOffset, and employee/manager assignee types resolve to the new hire and their line manager respectively (hr, it, and custom tasks keep their role label but aren't assigned to a specific person). Leave the template blank and the checklist starts with no tasks: add them one at a time.
Automatically, when a candidate is hired. Hiring a candidate through Recruiting (see Applicant Tracking) fires an internal event onboarding listens for. If your company has an onboarding template marked as the default (and it's still active), a checklist is created for the new hire right away, anchored on their actual hire date, with targetCompletionDate set to the start date plus the template's estimatedDays. If there's no default template, nothing is auto-created and you can still start one by hand. This is idempotent: an employee who somehow already has a checklist never gets a second one from this path.
Working a checklist
Selecting a checklist on the Onboarding Checklists page shows its tasks and a completion percentage. For each task you can:
- Complete it: stamps who completed it and when, with an optional note. Completing an already-completed task is a no-op.
- Skip it: only allowed for tasks that aren't marked required, and only before they're completed.
- Edit it: title, description, assignee type, and due date.
- Remove it from the checklist entirely.
- Add a new task directly on the checklist, outside the template.
Every one of those (except editing title/description/assignee/date) recalculates the checklist's completion percentage: completed and skipped tasks both count as done. Once every task on the checklist is done, its status flips to completed and a completion timestamp is stamped. This only happens the moment the last task finishes, not every time you look at it. Manager, HR, or whoever is working the list can act on any task regardless of the assignee type recorded on it; assignee type is a label for who a task is meant for, not an access restriction.
Checklist status
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
not-started | A valid status in the data model, but checklists are created directly into in-progress. You won't see this from normal use |
in-progress | Tasks remain outstanding |
completed | Every task is completed or skipped |
cancelled | Onboarding was called off |
Cancel stops a checklist that's no longer needed: a hire that fell through, for instance. It's only available on a checklist that isn't already completed or cancelled, and the cancel action rejects an already-cancelled checklist. The task API does not enforce cancellation as a permanent lock, so do not treat cancellation as a guarantee that later task changes are impossible.
Onboarding also cancels itself automatically: if an employee is terminated while their checklist is still not-started or in-progress, Arche cancels it for you. A checklist that already finished is left alone.
Frequently asked questions
Can an employee have two onboarding checklists? No. One employee, one checklist, enforced by the system. If you need to restart onboarding for someone, work with their existing checklist rather than trying to create a new one.
Does hiring a candidate always start onboarding automatically? Only if your company has an active template marked as the default. Without one, hiring still creates the employee record, but nobody's onboarding checklist appears until you start one from the Onboarding Checklists page.
If I edit a template after checklists already exist, do those checklists change? No. A template's tasks are copied onto a checklist at the moment it's created. Editing the template afterward only affects checklists started later.
Can I skip a required task? No. Required tasks have to be completed; only non-required tasks can be skipped. If a task genuinely doesn't apply, remove it from the checklist instead.
Who can complete or skip a task?
Anyone with manage_recruiting, regardless of the task's assignee type. The assignee (employee, manager, HR, IT, custom) is a label for whose responsibility the task is, not a permission boundary inside Arche.