How to Streamline Employee Onboarding and Reduce Administrative Burden
Milpitas School District uses clarity, consistency, and communication to simplify hiring and set new employees up for success.
- By Damon James, Heather Forsyth-Cano
- 01/12/26
Milpitas School District serves more than 10,000 students and approximately 950 employees, so we often onboard more than 100 new people a year. As the assistant superintendent and systems supervisor of human relations, we're busiest from June through August, when we're trying to get everyone's documents in order by the first day of school. During our years with the district, we've seen drastic improvements in the speed and efficiency of the human relations department.
When we used to conduct onboarding via paper forms that traveled from office to office in an envelope known as a "pony," it could take two or three weeks for one piece of paper to get where it needed to go, which meant it might take us 30 days after the interview process to finally have all of a new hire's paperwork in place. With Helios Ed, the paperless platform we adopted just after the pandemic, documents get transferred instantaneously, and we can now have a new employee ready to start in a week or less after their last interview. Working with different systems over the years, we've learned that successful onboarding comes down to three things: clarity, consistency, and communication.
Clarity: Making the Process Transparent for Everyone
Our onboarding begins when an employee applies through one of our various recruiting agencies. We give them a login to the paperless HR platform, which they use to submit all of their documents. As of last year, 99% of our HR documents are in the system. This means that new hires have one place where they can track their progress and access forms, without having to call, e-mail back and forth, or make an in-person appointment with HR just to drop off a form. Working in one shared system saves significant time for employees and for our team, especially when it comes to background checks and approvals.
Working in one platform from the beginning of their experience with the district also prepares employees to use this self-service approach throughout their career with us. They already know where to complete leave forms, change their personal information, and access additional documents, and they can complete and share their paperwork when it's convenient for them, not just between 8:00 and 5:00.
Consistency: Building Systems that Scale
Once we've hired someone, we use the HR platform to certify that they've done any mandated training and that they understand the training. We use it for forms that our employees need to submit at the beginning of the year, and employees get an automated notification if any of their medical requirements, credentials, or documents need to be updated.
Having an automated system is enormously helpful when it comes to compliance. Recently, for example, California has added a new requirement for school districts to contact every previous district employer for reference checks. If we're considering a veteran teacher with 15 years across 15 districts, that's 15 separate reference checks to track, which would be an enormous task without an automation that flags complaints or egregious acts that someone might have committed. Now, every candidate gets the same level of pre-hire scrutiny, so we feel confident that there won't be any surprises after they're hired.
Communication: Coordinating Across Diverse Groups
One of the biggest challenges in having a large number of people start work at once is tracking who has to be where and who has to do what. Our office can't send one blanket e-mail to everyone: Managers need different information than classified employees, who need different information than credentialed teachers. An added complexity is that our employees work vastly different schedules, ranging from contractors working one hour per week to full-time employees. Now that we're almost entirely paperless, we can schedule welcome messages from the superintendent or principals and announcements about union contracts or professional development so that everyone can start the year on the right foot.
At the beginning of every school year, the employees come back several days before the students. During that week, we have a districtwide Welcome Back, and sites have their own Welcome Back staff meetings as well. They also have on-site PD days, and then they have department PD meetings. The meetings start big, and then narrow down so that new hires spend more time with the group they'll be working with every day. Automation has made coordinating all this activity so much easier.
If we were advising a new HR administrator at a school district, we would say, "Take the time to make sure you have everything in order." In education, we're dealing with students who need support from teachers or from the system as a whole, so there's a sense of urgency. But if you skip a step in onboarding, you could potentially have someone not get paid, or hire someone who's not eligible to work, someone who shouldn't have made it through your system. Sometimes you have people telling you to move faster, whether that's a school board member, the superintendent, a principal, or a parent. But taking your time pays off in who you hire and how you prepare them to work in your district. The goal isn't just getting people in the door by the first day of school; it's setting them up for long-term success so they can best serve students.