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 ,

Thanks for the additional details. We have a few areas where we can automate this process:

1. Once HR approves, can we also include the ServiceNow mailbox address so that we can write an inbound action/flow to read this email and create the request automatically? I feel the email generated from the tool would be pretty standard, so we could read the content and create this request.
2. For any changes, agents can come and update the request directly, or we can send an email to the Service Desk DL with an RITM link to follow up on the request.

This way -> you completely eliminate the manual process and attachment headache. For compliance, you will always have the email approval in the system or we can add the entire body of the approval email to the Request/RITM notes!

Hope this helps!

[ShaunBP]

@Hemanth M1  these are some of the same thoughts I had, I just was unsure how to arrange things in the workflow designer. 
A couple of insights more into the current process before we get to your step 1. 

The hiring manager submits a new hire request from our internal tool. 
The email that is generated goes to two parties - HelpDesk and User Management. 
HelpDesk stays in a holding pattern until User Management verifies the request with HR. 
User Management will send the greenlight to HelpDesk to begin logging the request officically. 

I have had discussions with the User Management group to adjust the process so that HR is involved in the review step first. 

So ideally the flow would go something like this leading into your step 1. 

Hiring manager submits a request. 
Request gets routed to HR for them to approve or decline proceeding (Our HR group are not currently licensed in the platform)

 We are using the OOTB email address for inbound emails at this time. Maybe the flow could be designed so that when we receive the original request from the hiring manager, an email is sent to the HR group for their yes/no with the flow in a wait for condition state. 

If approved, create the subsequent RITMs to the responsible groups. 

Am I also understanding correctly that there could be a way to extract the contents from the new hire form as it arrived and have those values written to the record or perhaps a catalog item? 

I know the internal tool is primarily HTML based, so the structure is an HTML table with labels and values, row and column style, e.g. First Name - John, Last Name - Smith.

[Hemanth M1 · Accepted solution]

Hi @ShaunBP ,

yes, You can do something like this