Journey Use Case: Employee Onboarding

This article only applies to your community if your Firstup contract includes this functionality. Please contact your Customer Success Manager with any questions about feature availability for your community.

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Before You Start
Start the Journey
Add a Communication Step
Add a Decision Step
Additional Resources

One of the great things about journeys is how customizable they are. Instead of creating multiple journeys to reach different audiences, you can create one journey that takes multiple paths. An employee onboarding journey is a great example. Every new employee can start on the same journey but can take different paths depending on factors like their department or role.

Before You Start

Before creating a journey, know how you’ll be reaching your members. In our example, we’ll be delivering existing content to predefined audiences. You can, however, create content and control who receives your communications in Journeys.

See our Audience Attributes for Journey Automation article for more information on how to reach your members in journeys.

Looking for training on Journeys? Enroll in our eLearning course in the Training Center!

Start the Journey

Sign in to Creator Studio.
Navigate to the Journeys page.
Click the + Create Journey button.
Select the New Hire On-boarding template. Firstup created this template to give you a starting point for an employee onboarding journey.
Once on the journey workflow page, give your journey a descriptive name.
Select Start Type to determine which start type will initiate the beginning of the journey and for which audience/s.
For an employee onboarding, you will want to select the Daily start type and the time you want the journey to run each day. With the daily start type, the audience is checked each day at the specified time to see if any of its members meet the selected criteria. If so, they will be pulled into the journey at that time. You will add your audience in the next step. Check out this article to learn how to create custom audiences.
Now, select the trigger for your journey to begin. If you created a custom onboarding audience for this journey, you will be able to select it from the drop-down.

Add a Communication Step

Once you have configured your journey start, you're ready to add your first communication. For this example, the first communication will go out to new audience members at the next daily run time after the journey is published. If you choose not to refine your audience further, the first communication will be sent to any new audience members regardless of role, department, etc. In a later step, we'll show you how to add a decision step to send even more tailored communications to your new hires.

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For this example, the first communication will welcome new hires to the team and let them know what their first week has in store for them. Simply click the content you want to add to the communication.
While you can't edit the communication content in a journey (yet!), you can edit the email alias, subject line, preview text and add personalization attributes.
To preview the communication, click the Preview tab.
We suggest adding a delay step between communications to avoid overwhelming new hires with communications. You can set a delay in hour or day increments.
Consider additional information you want to send to your new hires as they onboard. These communications might look different for, say, people leaders.
- Bookmark these resources
- Feel heard and supported
- Your well-being is important
- Leverage learning opportunities
- Make connections
Click the “+” icon between journey steps to continue adding communications and delays that fit your organization's onboarding needs. When using delay steps, be sure to space your communications to avoid overwhelming journey members. You may reach a point in your journey where you want to send different communications to different members or end the journey for some members. You may reach a point in your journey where you want to send different communications to different members or end the journey for some members. Continue to the next step to see what this might look like for you.

Add a Decision Step

Let's say you've reached a point where you want to send additional communications to people leaders but are ready to end the journey for all other members.

Hover over the workflow line where you want to add the step, clicking the + sign, and select Decision.
Begin by clicking Split Decision.
Give your split a description, and define how you want to split your audience. For this journey, we're going to end the journey for all members who are not people leaders. People leaders will remain in the journey to receive applicable people leader comms. To do this, you can split the initial audience by the "Job Title" attribute and select all people leader job titles.
Once you have created the split, you can edit the workflow steps (add/remove) to ensure people leaders remain in the journey and that the journey ends for all other users.
Continue to add communication and delay steps to the "People Leaders" journey path. You can even split the people leaders path into additional paths based on attributes such as department or location for an even more personalized experience.