Looking for Best Practices: Onboarding Workflow & Attachment Handling

[ShaunBP]

Hi all!
We’re fairly new to ServiceNow and working on automating some of our employee onboarding process. Currently, logging records for onboarding requests is fully manual—creating a REQ and multiple RITMs for different assignment groups. We’ve started building a catalog item and workflow to streamline this.

Challenge:
Our assignment groups are used to having a copy of the onboarding form attached to each individual record (legacy process). Re-attaching the same file to every RITM feels inefficient, but we are exploring ways for our groups to:

• Access the latest form easily
• Be notified when attachments are added or updated (corrections happen occasionally)

Has anyone faced a similar challenge before? We are curious to discover what creative options may be available to us. For example, using journal updates with a link to the attachment instead of duplicating files?  

We welcome any feedback or suggestions!

[Hemanth M1]

Hi @ShaunBP ,

You have a long way to go to streamline this. To keep it simple, why not create a KB article, publish it and provide access to these groups so they can bookmark it and refer to it whenever needed?
Publish v2, v3, etc., whenever updates are made.

[ShaunBP]

Hello Hemanth!

Thank you very much for your reply. 

The attachments we would be working with are unique copies of the new hire forms. These would contain things like the new hires name, their location, etc. 

The KB article sounds like it would be more suited towards instructional documents, unless I am misunderstanding your suggestion. 

[Hemanth M1]

Hi @ShaunBP ,

Oh, okay, I thought these were general instructions. Where do you get these forms from, so that we can consider automating this or capturing them directly onto the RITMs?

Just want to understand the process here.

[ShaunBP]

Brace yourself! We are working with some legacy systems and procedures, but I'll provide some additional context so you can have a bit better picture of our overall process.

Current Process Overview:
Our employee onboarding requests originate from a custom-built HTML front end with a SQL backend, developed long before we implemented ServiceNow. Here’s how it works today:

1. Request Submission: The onboarding team enters the new employee’s details into this custom tool.
2. Email Notification: Once submitted, the tool generates an email containing the employee information.
3. HR Verification: That email is routed to our HR team, who reviews and confirms the details are correct.
4. Service Desk Action: After HR approval, HR will forward this same email with their approval to our service desk to manually log the request in ServiceNow. This email would be our trigger for creating the new hire records and the email from HR is what will be attached to all the records.