We see a lot of numbers thrown around when it comes to onboarding, but I believe there's one figure that should be given more focus: what a single onboarding costs you in labor.
Let's look at it in context. A typical company runs about 101 apps and platforms, and a new hire needs some subset of them provisioned before they can do anything useful. That's roughly four to eight hours of IT time per person. Put Forrester's fully burdened IAM rate of $66 an hour against it and you're at $300 to $500 per hire before your new hire has done a single productive thing. Extrapolate to 60 hires a year and that's around $24,000 in admin cost before anyone adds any value.
Here are a few more numbers that give a better sense of how big an undertaking onboarding actually is. Only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new people, which means nearly 9 in 10 walk into a first day that ranges from mildly disorganized to actively discouraging. And it shows up in the numbers that matter later, because up to 20% of turnover happens in the first 45 days, and strong onboarding is associated with 82% better retention.
But the unfortunate part of all this is nobody in IT actually plots against new hires having a good onboarding experience; quite the contrary. Every IT person I've talked to always wants new hires to have a good experience on their first day. The issue is that onboarding gets kicked off by an event from the HRIS, but it unravels the moment things get nuanced or technical. This then falls on IT to remember to complete each step. Unfortunately we humans are not that great at remembering things, and the whole thing becomes reactive instead of proactive.
So let's break down what's actually breaking and how you can rewire your onboarding flow with automation powered by AI ITSM systems like Ravenna.
Why does onboarding break?
While for the new hire, the onboarding is a single workflow, the back end is handled by up to three different teams that all have to coordinate and trigger action in specific order.
HR owns the hire record; IT owns identity, access, and the laptop; the manager owns team context, channels, and the first week of meetings; and security owns whether any of it was least-privilege. While each of these teams is competent at their specific part, the seams in between are where the workflow falls off.
And you’ve probably seen this firsthand: once you get the email from HR, they start provisioning accounts and creating work emails, only for the new hire to message you in the middle of their first day to tell you that they can’t seem to get into their workspace email and they haven’t received all their equipment (actually, 43% of new hires go more than a week before they get all the equipment needed to do their job.)
By day three, they’re still not added to all the channels, and you’re left to coordinate the process with their manager, the procurement team and legal.
What does automated onboarding actually look like with Ravenna?
If you want to fix the onboarding, making the new hire raise tickets on a portal is definitely not the answer. They might open the portal once, because somebody told them to, but then never again, so you have to come at this problem from a different angle.
In Ravenna, that starts with the HRIS. We integrate with Workday, BambooHR, HiBob, ADP, Rippling and more, and the sync pulls in the attributes that actually drive provisioning decisions: team, manager, location, role, department. That becomes what we call the Employee Knowledge Graph, and it’s the context every downstream action reads from. It’s the difference between “create an account” and “create an account for a Senior Data Analyst reporting to Priya in the Seattle office,” which are two very different provisioning outcomes.
From there, Ravenna allows you to sequence the actions in the onboarding flow to land before the start date rather than scrambling on the morning of because it has approval rounds and "Wait Until" scheduling built in. Here’s a quick list of things that Ravenna can help coordinate:
Assigns tasks for the team: Ravenna creates and assigns tickets that cover the steps in the onboarding flow for the respective teams.
Identity gets created. This step is handled by your HRIS and IDP. Your HRIS provisions the users in the IDP typically through integration.
Access cascades from role. Instead of provisioning app by app, IAM provisions birthright access to the new users via rules and groups and Ravenna handles any JIT access requests.
Everything reports into one Slack thread. IT, HR, and the manager watch the same progression in real time. When a step is completed, everyone sees it. When one fails, everyone sees that too, which is considerably better than finding out on Monday morning.
And once the new hire onboards, they’ll have Ravenna to answer questions, getting access to any additional platforms needed, triaging issues, and more. The best part is nobody has to build a complex deterministic workflow to pull this off. Ravenna agents can read context from your documentation and trigger the flow from your message.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Ravenna create the Okta account itself?
Ravenna handles Okta group assignments, application access, MFA enrollment, and password and MFA resets. We also support creating new users in Okta via workflow actions.
Which HRIS platforms does Ravenna integrate with?
Workday, BambooHR, HiBob, and Rippling. Workday and BambooHR connect through Merge, Rippling connects directly over its API, and HiBob uses a service user. The sync brings across the team, manager, location, role, and department.
How does Ravenna know somebody has been hired?
Your HRIS fires the new onboarding event to a webhook, and Ravenna creates the onboarding ticket from that payload. For the start-date trigger you can either use a second HRIS event or a scheduled job that reads the start date already stored on the onboarding ticket.
