TL;DR: A 38-person HR tech firm in Bristol was onboarding 15-20 new hires per year through a 90-day programme with 34 milestones. The operations manager tracked everything in a spreadsheet she checked at weeks 1, 4, and 12. Between check-ins, milestones drifted. By the 90-day probation review, 29% of milestones were still incomplete. Four of 17 hires last year hadn't completed mandatory compliance training. Voluntary turnover within 12 months: 31% (industry average: 18-22%). Exit interviews consistently said "I didn't feel set up properly." We built a four-stage agent that generates milestone plans from BreatheHR, tracks completion via integrations, prompts responsible people with escalation, and produces a weekly health dashboard with probation readiness scores. Milestone completion at 90 days: 71% up to 96%. Agent cost: £180/month.
Weeks 2, 6, and 8
New hire starts Monday. Claire, the operations manager, sent an email to IT the preceding Wednesday: "New starter Monday, please set up laptop and accounts." IT confirmed receipt. Sometimes the laptop was ready Monday. Sometimes Wednesday. Once, it took 9 days. The new hire spent their first week and a half logging into a colleague's machine to complete HR paperwork, which is a first impression that communicates something rather specific about how organised the company is.
Claire adds a new tab to her spreadsheet. Thirty-four rows. One per milestone. IT setup, system access, compliance training, team introductions, client exposure, buddy assignment, 30-day check-in, 60-day check-in, 90-day check-in, probation review preparation, and 24 role-specific training modules. Each milestone assigned to a responsible person: IT for provisioning, line manager for introductions, compliance team for training, buddy for social integration.
She sets calendar reminders. Week 1, week 2, week 4, week 6, week 8, week 12. At each checkpoint, she's supposed to open the spreadsheet, chase anyone behind, and update the colour coding. Green for done. Amber for in progress. Red for overdue. White for not started.
In practice, she checks at week 1 (the new hire is physically present, hard to ignore). She checks at week 4 (the 30-day review reminds her). She checks at week 12 (probation review is imminent).
Weeks 2, 6, and 8 are, in Claire's honest assessment, "aspirational." Between check-ins, milestones drift. The compliance training that should be done by day 14 gets pushed to day 30. The buddy introduction that should happen day 1 happens day 12 (or not at all). The client exposure that should start by week 3 starts at week 6 because the line manager forgot.
Claire is also running office operations, facilities, and vendor management. Onboarding tracking is approximately 20% of her job by importance and approximately 5% of her job by available time, which is a gap that 34 milestones fall into with predictable regularity.
The Firm
HR tech and professional services firm in Bristol. Thirty-eight employees. £2.8M annual revenue. Hires 15 to 20 new employees per year across consulting, development, and operations.
Claire's loaded cost: £38 per hour. She spends an estimated 8-12 hours per hire across the 90-day onboarding period: chasing, checking, updating, reminding. At 17 hires per year, that's £5,168 to £7,752 annually in Claire's time alone. Line managers spend an additional 4-6 hours per hire chasing onboarding tasks that should have been prompted automatically: £4,080 to £6,120 per year. Total annual cost of manual onboarding tracking: £9,248 to £13,872.
The completion numbers from the prior 12 months: 71% of milestones completed by the 90-day probation review. Meaning 29% were still outstanding when the formal assessment was due. Four of 17 hires reached their probation review without completing mandatory compliance training. Claire discovered this at the meeting. The spreadsheet had said "in progress" for all four. It had said "in progress" for 76 days.
Voluntary turnover within the first 12 months: 31%. Industry average for their size and sector: 18-22%. Exit interviews were consistent. "I didn't feel set up properly." "I was still figuring things out at month 3." "My buddy never really connected." "I didn't know who to ask." The onboarding programme existed. The follow-through didn't. And the gap between having a programme and executing it consistently was costing the firm roughly one in three new hires within their first year.
Why the Spreadsheet Failed
The spreadsheet captured intent. Thirty-four milestones, properly defined, properly assigned, properly sequenced. On paper, thorough. In practice, the programme depended on Claire remembering to check, responsible people remembering to act, and everyone maintaining focus on onboarding tasks alongside their primary jobs for 90 consecutive days.
The structural problem: onboarding milestones have dependencies. Laptop must be ready before system access. System access must exist before training. Training must complete before client exposure. If the laptop is 5 days late, every downstream milestone shifts. The spreadsheet didn't model dependencies. Claire carried them in her head. When IT was late (roughly 40% of hires), she had to mentally recalculate every subsequent timeline. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she was managing a facilities crisis and the recalculation didn't happen at all.
BreatheHR had a basic onboarding checklist feature. Nobody used it because it didn't connect to IT provisioning, the LMS, or Slack. A checklist that can't see whether the work was done is a list of aspirations.
The design is next. The design, the build guide, the running costs and the take-away are free to subscribers. Enter your email below and the rest of this Blueprint opens. New ones arrive every Tuesday and Friday.
