A preview of the new hire onboarding product. The left side features a desktop image of the Square web app with a series of tasks a seller can assign to new hires during onboarding. The right side features a mobile image of the tasks from the team member's perspective.

New hire onboarding

Square · 2024

Problem

Business owners subscribe to Square’s products to do a range of jobs, but using Square as their HR system wasn’t one of them. There was no structured way to onboard team members to their business and perform basic HR tasks like having employees fill out forms, upload documents, and check off other routine tasks. Sellers often asked us for a way to do these things within Square, so we set out to build a solution that could guide team members from the initial invitation to their first day on the job.

Solution

I collaborated with my product partner to pitch an onboarding vision to our leadership team. Once we got buy-in on the solution, we worked backwards from the long-term goal to sequence a cross-platform product we could release iteratively over a series of quarters. With each release, we shipped a new task type that sellers could add to their onboarding checklist for new hires in Square’s web app, such as reviewing their profile, uploading and viewing documents, and filling out payroll info. Employees could then check these off in the native iOS and Android apps.

To help chart a course, we started this project by talking to a group of small business owners who represented our target customers well—mostly, growing teams in the food and beverage industry. With their feedback as our guide, we were able to have clarity on much debated topics, like whether we should build support for I-9 forms or background checks. As we made progress, we launched an in-app survey to continue steering us towards the features customers cared about most. Once we felt the product met the onboarding needs of a majority of sellers and their teams, we graduated the product from beta.

A dashboard screen with a list of onboarding tasks for new team members, including “Review profile,” “View Specialty coffee manual,” “View Acme Coffee handbook,” and “Upload food handler’s certificate.”
A document management screen showing a list of documents, including an “employment-agreement.pdf,” with options to search, view, upload, and manage documents. A popover menu for the “employment-agreement.pdf” document, offering options to “Open in,” “Rename,” and “Delete.”
A form to upload a document for team members, with fields for the document type (e.g., “Emergency contact form”), optional instructions, and toggles for requiring an expiration date and making the document optional.
Two mobile screens displaying onboarding tasks for a new hire, Ashley, including “Review profile” and “Upload documents,” with a completion checklist and an option to add documents.
A screen prompting the user to tap their badge on the Square Reader to add the badge, displayed on a tablet.

Next up

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