Improve & Automate Employee Onboarding With The Power Platform

Employee onboarding frequently involves manual checklists in emails, spreadsheets, and notes. Steps vary by worker type, such as W-2 hourly, salaried, C2C, or 1099 contractors, leading to forgotten tasks and fire drills. Hiring managers, HR, and operations teams waste time troubleshooting inconsistencies.

In this comprehensive 5-hour workshop, Kelly Edinger (Senior Technical Account Lead at Pivotal Consulting and Microsoft Certified Trainer) builds a low-code automation system using SharePoint lists and Power Automate. The design exposes business-configurable elements like email wording and task assignments to SharePoint, keeping flows protected from direct edits. It supports maintainability for when roles change and catches variables across employee types.

What You Will Learn

• Licensing needs for Power Platform, including E3, E5, or Business licenses, with no per-user or premium connectors required
• How to spin up a free Dev tenant for safe experimentation outside your production environment
• Creating SharePoint communication sites for a home hub, HR operations, and employee-facing portals
• Registering sites as hubs in the SharePoint Admin Center for unified global navigation
• Building task lists in SharePoint to assign onboarding workflows to HR, operations, hiring managers, and IT
• Designing Power Automate flows triggered by onboarding forms that populate tasks based on employee type and custom variables
• Customizing welcome emails, task details, and assignments directly in SharePoint lists without modifying flows
• Testing workflows end-to-end and adapting for variations like remote, hybrid, contractor, or full-time onboarding

Key Takeaways

1. Use SharePoint lists as the business configuration layer. Kelly shows how to store variables like task assignees, email templates, and employee types in lists, allowing business users to update without touching Power Automate flows.
2. Start with a hub site for intranet foundation. Register a communication site as a hub to connect HR and employee sites, enabling consistent navigation and associated content rollups across onboarding resources.
3. Handle employee type variations systematically. Build conditional logic in flows using SharePoint choice columns to route tasks correctly for W-2, 1099, or C2C workers, reducing forgotten steps.
4. Prioritize SharePoint Admin access for site creation. If site creation is locked down, use the SharePoint Admin Center to provision sites, ensuring proper permissions for automation builds.
5. Document flows with naming conventions and comments. Kelly emphasizes clear naming and in-flow notes to make handoffs easy when team members change roles.

About the Speaker

Kelly Edinger is a Senior Technical Account Lead at Pivotal Consulting in Seattle, Washington. She brings 13 years of experience on the Microsoft stack, transitioning from hands-on development to governance, process improvement, and ROI-focused automation. As a Microsoft Certified Trainer, she draws from workshop mistakes, client pet peeves, and troubleshooting to deliver practical, business-friendly solutions.

Who Should Watch This

This workshop suits Microsoft 365 admins, HR operations leads, and IT pros who manage onboarding and want to reduce manual tracking in emails or Excel. You will gain the most if you handle troubleshooting for business automations or need self-service options for non-technical teams to adjust tasks and emails.

Watch if your organization deals with varied worker types like contractors or hourly staff, and you seek low-code ways to prevent fire drills. Skip if you already deploy enterprise-scale Power Platform governance with custom APIs, though Kelly's SharePoint-driven variations may inspire simpler alternatives.

Experienced Power Automate users will appreciate the focus on maintainability and business empowerment over advanced expressions.