Setting up systems for tracking applicants and onboarding new employees is the most high-leverage thing HR professionals can do for their company. You're on the front lines of growth and setting up new employees for success — challenges that pay longterm dividends once you're able to juggle all the balls associated with these processes.

Here, we'll show you step-by-step how to build the foundation for two systems in Notion that are tailored specifically to human resources and people ops teams: one for tracking applicants, one for onboarding. We've seen them have incredible impact for teams who are able to find the right talent and give them the tools they need to flourish.

In this piece, you'll learn:

• To create two databases — one for applicant tracking and one for onboarding that systemize your processes for scale.
• To organize and customize these databases to meet your team's needs.
• Best practices from the Notion People Ops team for more effective hiring and onboarding.

Pretty soon, you'll have two systems that look like this:

What are your current systems

for hiring and onboarding?

Do you have them? Can they be better?

People are your company's heartbeat. But you're the eyes. You need a system that sees where applicants are coming from and charts the course for how employees move forward once they're part of your company. Setting up these processes can be difficult, especially with the unique set of problems HR teams face when it comes to hiring and onboarding:

• Information overload during hiring — materials, notes and data about candidates come from everywhere throughout the hiring process, from phone screens to onsite interviews to sample work and resumes. Not having a system means you might miss vital info you need to make an important team decision.
• There's no onboarding process at all — without a system, important docs and tribal knowledge aren't passed to new employees. There's no way to know which new employee has completed what, and what they still need to do.
• New hires don't feel like part of the team — this is especially true for remote teams. Avatars from online profiles don't have much life. Plus, there's no good way to share your company culture or best practices with new employees digitally.

In Notion, you can create custom processes for hiring and onboarding, and keep all information about candidates and documents centralized in one place.

• One system for everything you need — resumes, portfolios, references, test projects and everything related to a candidate or employee are packaged in one place. Pages inside your project tracker hold all the information you and your team need to make decisions.
• Every aspect is totally customizable — mold Notion to how you work, like setting your interview schedules or onboarding steps. And as your company grows and processes change, all these aspects can be easily updated.
• Company-wide transparency — with centralized hiring and onboarding info, anyone at the company can quickly access it. Checking on the status of a referral or seeing where the new engineer is at in their onboarding makes the entire organization part of the process.