Prepare Onboarding Documents for New Hires

For any growing company, HR teams spend a significant amount of time preparing new hire packets. This process often involves converting a variety of documents (offer letters, contracts, forms) into a consistent format, merging them into a single file, and compressing them for easy sharing and storage. This repetitive and manual work can be a major time drain and a source of inconsistency.

With pdfAssistant, you can build a reusable workflow to automate the entire process of preparing new hire packets. By leveraging Workflows and Batch Processing, you can ensure that every new employee receives a perfectly formatted, professional, and compliant document package, all with a few clicks.

The Problem: Repetitive, Manual Document Preparation

Manually preparing onboarding documents is a tedious process that can introduce a number of risks and inefficiencies. For HR professionals, this means more time spent on administration and less time focused on employee engagement and strategy.

Key Challenges

Time-Consuming Tasks: Converting documents from various sources (like Word or Excel) into PDF, merging them, and compressing files for easy emailing takes valuable time away from HR staff.
Inconsistent Formatting: Manually compiling documents can lead to inconsistent layouts, branding, and file quality.
Large File Sizes: Unoptimized PDF packets can be too large to email, requiring extra steps and causing delays.
Compliance Risks: Documents not saved in an archival format (like PDF/A) or a print-ready format (like PDF/X) could be compromised or printed incorrectly.

The Solution: Automated Onboarding Workflows

pdfAssistant allows you to define your entire document preparation process once and apply it to every new hire. This creates a scalable and reliable system that ensures consistency, professionalism, and compliance every time.

Your customized onboarding workflow can include:

Converting all source files (e.g., Word, images) into a single, professional PDF format.
Merging multiple documents into a comprehensive packet (e.g., offer letter, employee handbook, benefits information).
Compressing the final file to a manageable size for effortless emailing or digital storage.
Converting to a specific standard like PDF/X for high-quality printing or PDF/A for long-term archiving.

Step-by-Step: Automate Your New Hire Documents

Here’s how an HR team can set up a streamlined workflow for onboarding.

Step 1: Define Your Document Preparation Workflow

Decide on the exact steps needed for your new hire packet:

Convert to PDF: Transform all documents to a universal format.
Merge: Combine the converted documents into one packet.
Compress: Reduce the file size.
Convert to PDF/A or PDF/X: Choose the final format based on your needs.

Step 2: Build the Workflow with the AI Assistant

In the pdfAssistant UI, you simply describe your steps in plain language, like: "First, convert all my Word files to PDF, then merge them. After that, compress the file, and finally, convert the output to PDF/A for our archive."

Step 3: Apply with Batch Processing

Save the workflow as "New Hire Onboarding." Whenever you have a new hire, you navigate to Batch Processing, click Add Tasks, and then select your saved Workflow. Next, you drag in all of your new hire's documents, review the tasks that will be added to your Task Queue, and confirm. Then, simply click Run All Ready Tasks, and all of the documents will start processing right away. You can download your output files from the right side panel labeled Output Files—either all at once in a .zip or one-by-one as you prefer.

The Benefits: Efficiency, Consistency & Compliance

Automating your onboarding document preparation with pdfAssistant provides a range of benefits that empower your HR team to be more strategic.

Significant Time Savings: Automate repetitive document handling tasks, freeing up valuable time.
Professional Consistency: Ensure every new hire packet has the same format and branding.
Compliance Ready: Quickly produce documents in the correct format for long-term archiving (PDF/A) or professional printing (PDF/X).

Example Use Case

Imagine an HR specialist onboarding five new employees in a single week.

The Problem

The specialist must manually prepare five separate packets. Each packet includes an offer letter (Word), benefits forms (PDFs), and a company handbook (Word). Manually converting and merging these documents takes up to an hour per person, a significant administrative burden.

The Solution

The specialist creates a "New Hire Onboarding" workflow in pdfAssistant. They then use Batch Processing to run all five sets of documents through the workflow simultaneously. In minutes, all five new hire packets are perfectly formatted, compressed, and ready to be sent, saving the HR specialist hours of manual work.

Final Thoughts: Focus on People, Not Paperwork

The role of HR is to build a strong company culture and support employees, not to be bogged down by administrative tasks. By automating the tedious parts of onboarding, your team can focus on what matters most: creating a positive and welcoming experience for new hires from day one.