Why onboarding still sucks (even though everyone's trying their best)

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Why onboarding still sucks

Rippling IT Product Lead Zaafir Kherani shares lessons from scaling IT operations at Rippling, on Rippling, from 300 to 5,000 employees in less than five years.

He explains how he managed approximately 60 new hires per week with a lean team and no dedicated IT support function at Rippling, with product managers handling IT admin alongside building products. Nearly five years of hands-on experience has shown him why the manual processes that work at 50 employees inevitably crash and burn at scale.

Most IT teams rely on spreadsheets, checklists, and administrative busywork, and that reliance on manual workflows comes with a number of clear and calculable costs.

Time sink:

• IT teams lose hours weekly chasing manual tasks

• Focus shifts from strategic work to repetitive admin

• Dozens of manual steps per new hire multiply rapidly

Productivity loss:

• New hires wait days or weeks for critical access

• Companies pay full salary while employees can't work

• Zaafir personally waited 2-4 weeks for tool access in previous roles

Security gaps:

• Manual processes guarantee mistakes, regardless of team quality

• Lingering access for offboarded employees creates breach risks

• Wrong security policies get applied to sensitive roles

• Compliance becomes nearly impossible to maintain

Rippling IT

As companies scale, these three problems compound exponentially. The good news is that you can start solving those problems with Rippling IT.

Check out these free guides to get started:

• The Complete Onboarding Automation Kit

• 3 AI Prompts to Streamline Onboarding and Offboarding