Three onboarding mistakes to avoid

Here are three last-minute tasks that leave new hires idle and systems exposed.  Tightening just a few process screws eliminates 90 % of fire-drills later.

1. Ad-hoc Account & Device Provisioning

• Pain: Laptop imaging, SaaS-account creation, and MFA setup start the morning someone walks in.  The result is lost productivity and inconsistent security settings.

• Fix: Automate “birth” of users and devices with identity-lifecycle tools (SCIM, Okta Workflows, Azure AD) and zero-touch MDM enrollment (Apple DEP, Autopilot).  Pre-stage hardware and credentials 24 h before start.

2. Permissions Bloat—or Starvation

• Pain: To save time, admins often give out broad local-admin or global SaaS roles. But on the flip side, over-locking screens can lead to a lot of back-and-forth between IT and users, making it a hassle.

• Fix: Assign each role (sales, engineering, and finance) to a least-privilege template. Automatically expire elevated rights after 30 to 90 days unless they’re renewed.

3. Missing Endpoint Baseline & Compliance Gate

• Pain: New machines hit the network unpatched, unencrypted, and without EDR/DLP.  Attack surface balloons before the first coffee break.

• Fix: Enforce a baseline (CIS, NIST) via MDM policies that verify OS patch level, disk encryption, and agent install before granting full network access.  Fail the check—device quarantines itself.

Codify these three hand-offs and onboarding becomes a push-button affair—faster starts for employees, fewer weekend scrambling for your HR and operations managers.

Mann does this for hundreds of businesses. Want to outsource it altogether? mann.com/hello