Every IT manager knows the feeling. It's 8:47am, a new hire starts at 9, and you're still provisioning their laptop, setting up their Google Workspace account, and trying to remember which Slack channels they need to be in.
By the time they actually have access to the tools they need to do their job, it's noon. Half their first day — gone.
At a company with 50 employees hiring 2 people a month, that's 24 half-days per year lost to onboarding friction. That's real money, real frustration, and a terrible first impression.
Why Onboarding Is Broken at Most SMBs
The problem isn't that IT managers are disorganized. It's that the information they need is scattered across too many places. The list of tools a new hire needs lives in someone's head, or a doc that hasn't been updated since Q3. The license inventory is a spreadsheet that's always slightly wrong. The provisioning steps are tribal knowledge passed from one IT person to the next.
When you're a 10-person company, this works fine. When you're 50, it starts to hurt. At 100, it's a genuine operational problem.
What a Good Onboarding Process Actually Looks Like
The companies that get this right treat onboarding like a repeatable workflow, not an ad-hoc scramble. Before the new hire's start date, IT has a checklist: hardware assigned, accounts created, software licensed, access granted. Everything checked off before 9am.
The key is having a single source of truth for what tools each role needs. A sales rep needs Salesforce, Slack, Google Workspace, Zoom, and maybe Gong. A developer needs GitHub, Jira, AWS, and Notion. When you have that mapped out, onboarding becomes a 20-minute task, not a half-day project.
The License Problem Nobody Talks About
Here's something that doesn't get enough attention: slow onboarding often means you're paying for licenses you're not using. If it takes two weeks to provision a new hire's tools, that's two weeks of SaaS subscriptions sitting idle. Multiply that across 10 hires a year and you're looking at real waste.
The flip side is also true. Rush onboarding means buying new licenses without checking if you already have unused seats. IT managers at fast-growing companies routinely discover they have 20 paid Figma seats and only 8 designers.
How to Fix It
You need three things: a complete inventory of every tool and license your company uses, a role-based provisioning template (what does each job function need?), and a trigger that kicks off the process before day one — not on it.
Tools like CoreIT give IT managers a single place to manage this. When a new hire starts, you assign them a role profile and the right software stack gets provisioned from existing licenses where possible. No more scrambling. No more paying for seats nobody's using.
The Bottom Line
Slow onboarding isn't just an IT problem — it's a business problem. It costs money, kills first impressions, and signals to new hires that the company isn't as organized as it looked in the interview. Fixing it doesn't require a massive overhaul. It just requires a single source of truth that IT can actually rely on.
If you're managing IT for a 20–500 person company and onboarding still feels chaotic, it's worth 10 minutes to see what a structured approach looks like. Free trial, no credit card required.
