Saana Karikumpu
Back to Portfolio
Onboarding & Employee Experience

Redesigning Employee Onboarding

As HR Development Specialist, I redesigned the onboarding journey so new employees would feel supported and connected — and managers would have a clear framework to follow.

What this project demonstrates

  • Needs Analysis
  • Stakeholder Collaboration
  • Journey Mapping
  • Employee Experience
  • Process Improvement
Impact

Key outcomes

  • New employees reported feeling more supported, better informed, and more connected to the organization from their first weeks.
  • Managers gained a clear framework and concrete tools, reducing uncertainty and making onboarding consistent across teams regardless of who was leading it.
  • The redesigned onboarding pilot received an average satisfaction rating of 9/10 from participating new hires.

The work

03 chapters

The Challenge

As a Human Resources Development Specialist, onboarding was one of my core responsibilities. Through one-on-one discussions with new employees at different stages of their onboarding, I uncovered a recurring issue: many newcomers felt unsupported and left to navigate the organization largely on their own.

Responsibilities between HR, managers, and teams were unclear, induction content, planning, and execution were inconsistent, and the first months often depended on how proactive an individual employee and their manager happened to be.

My Approach

  1. 01Interviewed new employees at different stages of onboarding to understand where support broke down and why.
  2. 02Interviewed middle managers to surface their perspective, constraints, and unspoken assumptions about who owned what.
  3. 03Mapped the end-to-end onboarding journey with stakeholders, tracing the employee experience from recruitment through the first months on the job
  4. 04Identified gaps, overlaps, and handover points where new employees were most likely to fall through the cracks.
  5. 05Co-designed the redesigned journey with HR and managers so the people running it felt ownership from day one.

The Solution

  • Onboarding as a journey, not an event: we reframed onboarding as a continuous experience from offer stage through the first months, not a one-day induction.
  • Clear ownership at every step: HR, managers, and teams each got defined responsibilities, removing the ambiguity that had left new hires unsupported.
  • Structured manager check-ins: predefined touchpoints gave managers a framework to follow instead of relying on individual initiative.
  • Making the right thing easy: job aids and reminders helped managers do the right thing by default, without adding bureaucracy.
All projects