Anita Chandrasekhar leads talent strategy and operations at Zapier. Her team was onboarding a talent ops hire, a technical recruiter and a non-technical recruiter at once. Managers wanted to write detailed onboarding plans but didn’t have the hours, so plans varied a lot in rigor. In a fully remote company, new hires were left guessing.
2 skills, 1 page. A manager runs the first skill in Claude. It asks about the new hire, pulls in links and people to meet, drafts a welcome note in the manager’s voice and builds a week-by-week onboarding page in Coda. The new hire runs the second skill, which walks them through that page one section at a time.
Checks for understanding. After each section, the skill asks a few quiz questions. Nobody scores them. A wrong answer just points the new hire back to the right page.
It handles the logistics. It finds open time and books 1:1s, blocks time for longer reading and drafts Slack messages for access requests. Nothing gets sent without the new hire approving it.
Guardrails matter. Don’t dump everything at once, and don’t invent links. If the skill doesn’t know an answer, it says so and sends the new hire to their manager.
Building a plan now takes managers about 30 minutes instead of hours. Next on her list: connect the ATS and interview notes, so growth areas flagged during interviews show up in the onboarding plan.
Her advice: name the problem before you pick the tool, then ship a first version and keep iterating.
