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💥 Onboarding Plans are the most impactful new [core] Workday functionality of the year.

Fully utilized, Workday 2025R1’s Onboarding Plans can transform your organization’s joiner experience… all for the palatable cost of $0 with your existing Workday subscription 😉

Onboarding Plans are Workday’s solution to…

🤝 Bridge the offer-to-start-date time gap

🌎 Manage global onboarding requirements

💼 Handle a million different onboarding needs without mass chaos

♻️ Easily recycle, manage, and track onboarding materials

By the end of today’s newsletter, you’ll know what’s ✨ possible ✨ with Onboarding Plans. And you may just gain the talking points you need to pitch them to leadership.

So, what do these plans look like in practice? Let’s explore!

Prior to Workday’s first release of 2025, softly put—Onboarding in Workday left much to be desired (as you’ve probably experienced for yourself) 😬

Basically, you had the Onboarding business process, on which you could configure tasks, to-dos, and basic email notifications. From an administrative perspective, managing tasks, documents, policies, and procedures for distinct populations was chaotic at best. Think, endless condition rules and/or several versions of the Onboarding BP…

And from your joiner’s perspective? The experience likely felt disjointed: a handful of inbox tasks, generic Workday-branded emails to decipher, and whatever manual or outside-the-system processes your team set up. Automated touch points between offer acceptance and day one were sparse, impersonal, and easy to miss.

Well, these two 2025R1 features can change all that (🔗 we hyperlinked the Release Notes below, however, we invite you to keep reading and check them out later)…

What does Workday’s “new Onboarding experience” actually entail? It’s essentially…

With Onboarding Plans, you can create thoughtfully curated onboarding content tailored to specific populations. Available to pre-hires on your external career site and to new hires within Workday, this content supports your joiners from the moment they accept their offer through the end of their first year at your company (if desired).

We recently hired an incredible candidate here at Well Built Solutions—his name is… Donald Duck 🤭 He starts with us next week (we’ve given pre-hires access to Workday to begin completing some of their onboarding tasks ahead of their start date).

When Donald logs into Workday, he sees an “Onboarding Timeline” card:

This card automatically displays the joiner’s active Onboarding Plan assignment. From there, they can click “View Onboarding Plan” to see the full scope of what’s ahead.

Within their Onboarding Plan, your hire sees every component they’re eligible for (we’ll get into how visibility works soon—hang tight!).

So, what kinds of components show up here?

Check out the diagram below to see what’s possible:

Now… let’s demystify how you can configure all of these components!