Manually trigger or re-trigger onboarding for an employee

Most onboardings are triggered automatically when you add a new employee with Onboarding status. There are a few cases where you need to trigger one manually:

• Returning employees. Someone left and is coming back; you want them to go through a refreshed onboarding.
• Recovery from a missed automatic trigger. Something went wrong when the employee was first added, and onboarding never started.
• Testing. You want to verify a workflow change before the next real new starter arrives.
• Updates to the workflow. You’ve added a new task to your custom workflow that you want existing recent starters to also do.

Trigger an onboarding manually

1. Sidebar then HR Hub then Onboarding.
2. Find or open the employee you want to onboard.
3. Click the action to start a new onboarding instance for them.
4. Pick the workflow template (your custom one is the default).
5. Confirm.

The platform creates a fresh onboarding record, fires the workflow, and schedules the email sequence. The employee’s portal opens up with the new tasks the next time they sign in.

What happens to the previous onboarding (if any)?

If the employee already had an onboarding record (e.g. they completed one previously), the new manual one runs alongside it. Their old record stays on file with all its history. The new instance has its own status, tasks, and emails.

This means you can have an audit trail of “first onboarded on X date, re-onboarded on Y date with the new workflow”.

Test fire (admin diagnostic)

If you want to test a workflow change without affecting a real employee, the platform has a test fire option for admins. This runs the workflow logic and shows you the resulting steps and emails, without actually sending the emails or creating real tasks.

Useful for:

• Verifying a new task you’ve added to the workflow appears in the right order
• Checking email merge tags fill in correctly
• Diagnosing why a particular workflow event didn’t fire

The test fire option is in the workflow templates admin area. The output is logged to the workflow runs view so you can review it.

Manual triggers vs automatic triggers

In the platform’s terminology, the onboarding workflow has a trigger type of employee_created. The automatic trigger fires when an admin saves a new employee with Onboarding status.

Manually triggering is the same workflow with the same template, just fired by an admin action rather than the employee creation event. The new starter’s portal experience is the same either way.

When NOT to manually trigger

A few cases where manual trigger isn’t the right tool:

• An employee is just stuck on a specific task. Don’t restart their whole onboarding, that loses their progress. Help them through the blocker instead.
• You want to update an existing employee’s profile. Onboarding is for the joining flow. Profile edits go via the employee’s profile page, not via re-triggering onboarding.
• You need to send a one-off email to an employee. Use the Comms module instead. Re-firing onboarding will send the full sequence, not just one email.