Grow with quality using these systems to track applicants and onboard new hires

Setting up systems for tracking applicants and onboarding new employees is the most high-leverage thing HR professionals can do for their company. You're on the front lines of growth and setting up new employees for success — challenges that pay longterm dividends once you're able to juggle all the balls associated with these processes.

Here, we'll show you step-by-step how to build the foundation for two systems in Notion that are tailored specifically to human resources and people ops teams: one for tracking applicants, one for onboarding. We've seen them have incredible impact for teams who are able to find the right talent and give them the tools they need to flourish.

Pretty soon, you'll have two systems that look like this:

Do you have them? Can they be better?

People are your company's heartbeat. But you're the eyes. You need a system that sees where applicants are coming from and charts the course for how employees move forward once they're part of your company. Setting up these processes can be difficult, especially with the unique set of problems HR teams face when it comes to hiring and onboarding:

• Information overload during hiring — materials, notes and data about candidates come from everywhere throughout the hiring process, from phone screens to onsite interviews to sample work and resumes. Not having a system means you might miss vital info you need to make an important team decision.

• There's no onboarding process at all — without a system, important docs and tribal knowledge aren't passed to new employees. There's no way to know which new employee has completed what, and what they still need to do.

• New hires don't feel like part of the team — this is especially true for remote teams. Avatars from online profiles don't have much life. Plus, there's no good way to share your company culture or best practices with new employees digitally.

In Notion, you can create custom processes for hiring and onboarding, and keep all information about candidates and documents centralized in one place.

• One system for everything you need — resumes, portfolios, references, test projects and everything related to a candidate or employee are packaged in one place. Pages inside your project tracker hold all the information you and your team need to make decisions.

• Every aspect is totally customizable — mold Notion to how you work, like setting your interview schedules or onboarding steps. And as your company grows and processes change, all these aspects can be easily updated.

• Company-wide transparency — with centralized hiring and onboarding info, anyone at the company can quickly access it. Checking on the status of a referral or seeing where the new engineer is at in their onboarding makes the entire organization part of the process.

Someone's journey with your company starts the moment they consider applying. With Notion, you can create a branded, consistent, high-quality experience all the way from application to onboarding, setting the foundation for your growth by establishing a solid process.

Your applicant tracker and new hire onboarding systems are two different databases built on the same foundation. The applicant tracker will help you move potential hires through your recruiting process. Similarly, the onboarding system will help you set a process where new hires get oriented with all the appropriate materials.

With them, you'll be able to seamlessly move people from applicant to onboarded teammate, tracking every step in both processes. Here's how to build them yourself.

You can make many different kinds of databases in Notion: a table, calendar, list, board and more. Here, we'll be making a board — a collection of individual pages you can move from one stage to the next.

• Type / and you'll see a list of things you can include in a Notion page. This is called the "slash command." You can use it to do just about anything in Notion.

• Add a new page and then select Board from the templates you see listed.

• At the top of the board are columns. These will act as stages in your process, which you can customize however's best for you. In your Applicant Tracker, they'll be stages like "Lead," "Interview," etc. In your New Hire Onboarding, they'll go from "Not Started" to "Complete."

• We've included a few blank cards in your board. Each will eventually be cards for your candidates or new hires where all their information will live. Inside each card are properties — different attributes that describe a candidate or employee. Create any number of different properties you'd like. Click + Add a property to make your own.

  • Click on a property and under PROPERTY TYPE, you'll see a menu for the types of properties you can include. Use a Select property to assign a lead source, like "Inbound" or "Referral." Try a Person property to tag the hiring manager. There's even an Email property for contact info.

  • You can add or remove properties easily, and when changing the properties, you only need to do it once. Edits will be reflected when you make a new page.

  • Based on any Select, Multi-select or Person property, you can change the columns in your board. Maybe you want to see status of new hire onboarding. Or maybe you want to see how many referrals are in the pipeline. To change the columns on your board, hit Group by on the top right.

Boards in Notion pull double duty — they track process while keeping all relevant information neatly bundled together. This'll save you time assembling disparate notes and sources of information about and for applicants and new hires alike, while allowing everyone on your team to contribute to the process.

A company's hiring and onboarding processes are as unique as fingerprints. Notion is like a set of building blocks you can use to create the perfect system for your needs.

• Show properties in your board view — to understand what's going on with your candidates and new hires at a glance, you can display them right on the cards in your board. Instead of needing to click into a card to see an applicant's location or the hiring manager, you can see all that info right from the board view. On the top right of your board, click ••• and hit Properties. Toggle the ones you want to display. You can even rearrange them using the ⋮⋮ icon.

• Change views for whatever you need to see — with Notion, you can serve the same dataset many different ways. You can have a list of all the new hires you made this year. You can have a calendar of when they started. You can even set up views just for different teams, both for hiring and onboarding.

  • To do it, click + Add a view near your board's title. Then select the type of database you want, give it a name and hit Create. Next, you're going to apply different filters to surface only the information you want to see in this specific view.

  • Hit Filter, then + Add a filter. These are all related to the properties in your cards. For example, maybe you only want to see which hiring managers closed roles and when. You can filter to just see those, then hit Sort and + Add a sort to organize by start date.

Here’s a 4-minute video teaching you everything you need to know about using advanced database filters.

With custom views, Notion is like another member of your team, giving you only the information you need when you need it. Even teams or hiring managers can create views they need. This helps package what was once a large dataset into more manageable (and relevant) pieces.

More properties & views for your Applicant Tracker

Properties will help organize and prioritize all the applicants in the pipeline. Here are a few that might help:

• The role they're filling — a Select property where you can designate what team this person will be joining, from product to customer support.

• Their contact — an Email or Phone property so you don't have to dig through your inbox to quickly and easily touch base with them.

• Website — a Website property for their personal website, so anyone on the team can review samples, design work and anything else.

• Skills — a Multi-select property where you can create any number of tags based on their skills, like "Front End" or "UX" for an engineer.

• Source of the application — whether it's a referral, a cold inbound or a warm intro, you can use a Select property to track where you're getting the most leads.

  With such an ocean of applicants, custom views act like a net so you're surfacing only what's relevant right here and now. Try these:

• By team — a table view of candidates by team, like engineering or marketing.

• By hiring manager — a board view where each column is a different hiring manager, and all the roles they're responsible for are pages filed underneath.

• By source — with many applicants in the pipe, it can be beneficial to see where they're coming from. This board view, where columns are organized by source, helps with that.

• A calendar of start dates — a calendar view so you can see when candidates are starting.

More properties & views for your New Hire Onboarding

Properties help create visibility into the onboarding process, both for new hires and for teammates responsible for certain steps in the process. Here are a few we like:

• Their department — a Select property where you'll include the department this new team member is joining.

• Start date — with a Date property, you can assign a start date for new employees. This helps with scheduling check-ins down the road, like at 90 days or one year.

• Putting a face to the name — with a Files & media property, you can include a photo of your new hire so existing team members can get to know them more personally.

• Fun facts — a Text property where the new employee can include a fun fact about themselves, like if they think a hotdog is a sandwich or not.

  Views are important so you can see where everyone's at in the onboarding process, no matter what department they're part of or when they started. These might be helpful:

• By team — a board where the columns are different departments and new hires are slotted in each one. You can also create custom views for each team to see only additions to that team.