Seamlessly onboard new starters with an automatic workflow that guides your teams through training.
See it in action here 👇
This article covers how to build a zap with these steps:
A new starter signs on a document sharing tool (like Panda Doc)
The signing of the document triggers an onboarding task in Trail
Teams complete the training task to help get new team members up to speed
How do I get started?
You'll need an account with Zapier to use this integration.
Create the task
We have a ready-made template in the library, which you can copy and edit for the needs of your business.
It has an automated task schedule, meaning it only appears when triggered by Zapier.
The number of days you select will determine how long your teams have to onboard the new starter. Most people allow a couple of weeks for all the training to occur.
Set up the trigger - a signing platform that tells Trail when there's a new starter.
You may use any signing platform as long as they integrate with 1000+ apps via Zapier eg. Pandadocs or SignRequest.
Once you have decided on your platform, you will need to set up a form template.
This is a template of the document you want them to sign. This can often be uploaded as a pdf or in some cases you may have to build the form on their platform.
As part of your template, you will need a question to indicate which site the person is working at (ideally a dropdown to prevent typos). Depending on which signing platform you are using this process may vary.
This is an example form using Pandadocs:
More on setting up triggers in Zapier here.
c) Send this form to yourself to fill out and gather some example data to work with in later steps.
Search for your signing platform as the trigger, and the event as Document Completed. This means the zap will run whenever this happens.
If you haven't used Trail on Zapier before, you may need to authorise your account. There's a full explanation on how to do that here.
Once authorised, you'll be able to choose a template to "trigger" on. You'll want to use a document that you use to identify your new starters, like a contract.
5. Selecting the site
As Zapier will need the ID of your site, rather than the name we'll need an extra step after the document signing.
I've used a 'utilities' look up table, that allows you to associate the site name with the relevant ID. You're able to find these by going to your Site Settings page. The look up key is using data from the document (the site field). It takes the output of this and references the table to find the site ID. We'll use this in a later step.
It's important that the site name on the document matches the look up table exactly, so using a dropdown on the document is useful.
6. Set up the Action
This is where you'll set up your onboarding task to send to your site - the New Starter task from earlier.
First, select Trail as the app and the action event as 'Create Task'.
Then, once you've selected your account, you'll choose the task to automate and the site that should complete it.
When it comes to selecting a site, you're able to make this dependent on the trigger step. So, you'll be able to choose the ID that we got in the previous step by clicking Custom in the dropdown.
You can adapt the description of the task, e.g. add in the new employee's first name from the form using the Custom option. You might find this article on advanced formatting helpful too!
You can use the due date field here if you need to override the settings on the task in Trail. If it's left blank, it will default to the number of days you wrote in the task editor.
And that's all!
Give that a test and watch the task magically appear on Trail 💥
Now set that zap live and send off a new template from the signing platform to watch the whole thing work automatically.