A template is a collection of activities and goals that you can reuse for every new hire, so you don’t need to start everything from scratch every time.

As a good practice, you could build one template that is good for every new hire. Including activities that everybody should know such as a welcome video from the CEO, a tour of the office, and meeting HR. And then you could build one template per role, per department, per location. It's really up to you!

It's also good to know that when assigning an onboarding template to a new hire, you can select many templates.

For example, you may have one template that contains all the activities needed whenever a new employee of any kind is hired, while another template is only the pre-arrival activities specific to new marketing employees. Using both templates in your plan will give you all the activities needed to get a brand-new marketing employee ready before their first day in just a few clicks!

In this article, we’re going to go over the parts of a template and how to use one. Before getting started with templates, make sure you understand activities and plans.

When you open a template, you’ll see a calendar view similar to a plan calendar. Most of the features and functionality on the template calendar are the same as plans. In this section, we’ll do a brief overview of what you’ll see on the template calendar view.

1. Template title and cover image

This is how you will recognize a template. Templates for inspiration cannot have their title or cover image changed but custom templates can have these edited at any time.

2. Relative time

Because templates are meant to be reused, the actual date activities are assigned have no significance. The important part of activities in a template is their relation to each other and the first day selected when using a template.

For example, any activities on the template's First day will apply to the Start date selected for a plan, whether that day is a Monday, Thursday, or any other day of the week. Any activities made for the second day will appear relative to that start date.

3. Activities

Like with plans, activities show on templates as blocks of information. You can see the role an activity is assigned to. If you are on a custom template, you can move, add, and edit activities like you can in plans.

4. Preview a template

You can preview what the activities in a template will look like on the Home page of different assignees, just like you can with plans.

5. Filter template activities

Limit the activities you see on the calendar by their contact person or assignee.

There are two ways that you can use templates. You can use a template in an existing plan to add activities or you can start your plan using a template.

See Activities and templates for inspiration to learn how to add templates to an existing plan.

To start a new plan from a template, open the Onboarding plans list page by clicking Onboarding the left menu.

Click on New at the right.

Choose the type of plan. Know that we support Onboarding a new hire, Crossboarding someone coming back form sick/parental leave and Reboarding a teammate in a new role.

Enter the information of the new hire.

Find the template you want to use to start your plan and click Select.

Add a teammate so that they are assigned a role for the template activities. To add a teammate just start typing their name and select them from the dropdown. Click Create plan when all the roles have been assigned.

You now have a plan with activities already created and assigned, ready for you to further customize it or schedule an invitation!