Pre-onboarding made simple

Between signing the contract and day one: four to eight weeks of silence. Then day one hits and everything happens at once. Laptop, accounts, tools, team, office, paperwork.

Half of it could have been handled earlier.

Why onboarding breaks before day one

Most companies know pre-onboarding is useful. Most still skip it. The blocker: new hires don’t have access to company systems yet.

No Slack, no corporate email, no VPN, no intranet.

If you want to send something before day one, you’re stuck with a personal email address. That means PDFs, maybe a link to the intranet (which won’t work because their account doesn’t exist yet), or nothing at all because the friction is too high.

Some companies buy dedicated onboarding software. It works, but it costs money and takes time to configure. Makes sense at 200 people. At 30, probably not.

What new hires actually need to know

The questions are predictable. Most come up in week one:

Where’s the office? How do I get there? Is there a dress code? What time do I show up on day one? Who’s on my team? Who’s my buddy? What tools does the team use? Is there a handbook? Where’s the cafeteria menu?

None of these are sensitive. None need a company account.

A simple solution that works

Create a page with the basics, accessible without login. A Notion page with “Share to web,” a simple website, a Google Doc with read access. The platform doesn’t matter.

What goes on it: welcome message, logistics for day one (time, location, who to contact), team names and photos, the tools you’ll be using, and links that work without login (cafeteria, parking, directions).

The problem: the link is long, ugly, and hard to remember.

Using Lora shortcuts for this

Create a shortcut: short/welcome. Point it to your onboarding page. Set it to “Unlisted” so anyone with the link can see it without logging in.

Your welcome email: “Everything you need for your start: short/welcome”

Want to personalize? Create individual shortcuts for each person: short/welcome-anna goes to a page with Anna’s team, her buddy, her office location.

Ten minutes to set up. No IT, no license costs.

After day one

The shortcut stays useful once they have their company account and are navigating the tool maze.

short/handbook → employee handbook. short/tools → all tools in use. short/org-chart → org chart. New hires can orient themselves instead of asking “Where do I find X?” at every step.

Teams that use this see fewer of those questions in week one. Not zero, there are always things a shortcut can’t solve. But the standard ones (“Where’s the wiki?” “Brand guidelines?” “How do I expense this?”) get answered by the link.

Who should do this

This works for teams that hire regularly. If you bring someone on every few months, a basic email is enough. If you hire three or more people per quarter, the same questions keep coming up. Writing down the answers once and making them searchable through a shortcut saves time and frustration.

And you’ll notice something while putting the list together: assembling the 15 most important resources for new hires forces you to look at what you actually have. Which pages are stale. Which links are dead. Which information doesn’t exist yet. You end up auditing your documentation without meaning to.

What to do now

Spend 30 minutes. Write down the 10 questions every new hire asks in their first week. Make a page that answers them, accessible without login. Give it a shortcut.

Next time you hire someone, put the shortcut in the welcome email. See if the “Where do I find…?” messages in week one go down.