A template is the reusable blueprint behind every onboarding. Build it once, and you can assign it to every new hire — each one gets their own checklist from it. This guide covers creating a template and shaping its tasks.

Templates live under Onboarding → Templates (/dashboard/onboarding/templates). From there you can build new templates, duplicate existing ones, and activate or deactivate them.

Create a template and add tasks

Start a new template and give it a name, then add the tasks a new hire's onboarding should include. Each task is where the detail lives — you'll set several properties on it below.

Add as many tasks as the role needs. Think of the template as the full first-weeks plan for a position, not just day one.

Set each task's party and phase

Two settings decide who does a task and when it shows up.

Party — the role that owns the task: New Hire, Admin/HR, Director of Ops, Asst. Director, Manager, Scheduling, or System. Onboarding is a shared effort, so assign each task to whoever's actually responsible.
Phase — where it falls in the timeline: Pre-Hire, Day One, First Week, First Month, or Ongoing. Phases are how the checklist groups and paces itself.

Add dependencies so tasks unlock in order

You can make a task wait on others by setting its dependencies (dependsOnTaskIds). A task with unmet dependencies starts out BLOCKED and opens automatically once the tasks it waits on are finished.

Use this to enforce real order — for example, keep a Day One task blocked until an Admin/HR task that sets up the account is done. When a dependency clears, the dependent task unlocks on its own.

Link courses, review documents, and compliance tags

Each task can carry a few extras that make it do more than just sit on a list:

Linked LMS course — attach a course, and finishing that course auto-completes the task. The hire never marks it by hand.
Review documents (reviewDocuments) — attach the files a hire must read as part of the task.
Compliance rule tag — tag a task with the DODD rule it satisfies (for example, §7.005), so your onboarding maps cleanly to the requirements it's meant to cover.

Linking courses and tagging compliance rules is what turns a template into an audit-ready record. When a surveyor asks how you train a rule, the tagged task and its completed course are the answer.

Reuse with inheritance and duplication

You don't have to rebuild similar templates from scratch.

Inheritance — a template can inherit a parent template's tasks, so shared, baseline steps live in one place and each child adds only what's specific to it.
Duplicate — copy an existing template as a starting point, then adjust.

Activate and assign

When a template is ready, activate it so it's available to assign. Deactivate ones you're no longer using to keep the list clean. To put a template to work, see Assigning and tracking staff onboarding.