Don't ask an AI for an onboarding plan, ask what your docs are missing

sweetmelon team · HR

Someone starts on Monday and the plan for their first two weeks is a folder of documents and whoever happens to be free. Ask an AI for an onboarding program and you get one that would suit any company in any industry: meet the team, learn the tools, settle in. Give it your actual material instead. The role description, the procedures, the runbooks, the ticket history, the notes from whoever trained the last hire. Ask it to work from that material only, and to produce the pieces in order rather than a finished plan: what this person should be able to do alone by the end, what they need to know before day one, where new people go wrong most often, what order to teach the parts in, and how you will know they can do the work rather than follow along. That last one is where most handovers quietly end. Training stops at "ask me anything" and three weeks later someone finds out they have been doing it wrong the whole time. Tell it to mark anything your material does not cover instead of filling the hole itself. It comes back saying the documents never state who approves an exception. That gap is the point. You end up with a list of what your documentation is missing, ordered by what a new person needs first, which beats any backlog you would have written yourself. After a few hires, put their check results side by side. A mistake that recurs across people usually means the material explains that part badly, and the fix belongs in the documents rather than in another conversation.