The day-one link email, and why the new hire asks anyway

Forty links, six of them dead

Monday morning of week one. In the inbox: a welcome email with forty links, assembled by copying last year's welcome email. Six of them 404, two point at tools the company stopped paying for, and one goes to a Drive folder the new person does not have access to yet. Meanwhile IT has sent a separate setup doc, and the manager has sent a third list in chat, and none of the three agree about which project tracker is the current one.

So the new hire does the rational thing and asks. In week two they ask again about something else, and in week five they are still asking, because the underlying problem was never the content of the email. The real question is where everything is kept, and an email cannot answer that. An email is a snapshot of what one person remembered on one afternoon.

Answer it once, in the place they already look

Put the links on a board and mark the board required. The new hire accepts the invite, opens a browser tab, and the company boards are there — no forwarded email, no bookmark step, no "did you get my message". Members cannot remove a required board, so it is still there in month four when they need the expense policy for the first time.

The onboarding doc goes out of date the moment it is sent; a board is the same object the whole team is already correcting.When Ops changes the payroll portal link, the new hire's copy changes too, because it was never a copy.

• One required Start Here board: accounts, tools, handbook, who to ask
• Categories per function so a long board stays scannable
• Text blocks that say which of the two dashboards is the real one
• The team's calendar as a read-only ICS feed, so deadlines are visible without a second invite

Onboarding is a cadence, not a day

Most of what a new person has to learn is not front-loaded. It is the weekly report they will run for the first time on day nine, and the month-end close in week five. Checklists on a board support a recurring cadence, so those rituals surface on their own instead of depending on someone remembering to mention them.

That is also what turns the onboarding board into a permanent board. It stops being a thing you hand to new people and becomes the page the whole team uses, which is the only reason it stays accurate.

The same feature, running backwards

Offboarding is where link management usually fails invisibly. Someone leaves, their laptop goes back, and the bookmark bar goes with it — including the three vendor portals only they used, which nobody discovers for two months.

Revoke access in one action and every link stays with the workspace. Boards they owned can be reassigned to a successor, so the handover is an assignment rather than an archaeology project. Set up well, the last day is quieter than the first.

What this does not do

Linksley is not an HR onboarding suite. There are no forms, no e-signatures, no policy acknowledgements, no background checks, no payroll setup. If you need the paperwork half of onboarding, keep the HR tool you have and let it do that.

This solves the other half — where is everything — which is the half that generates the messages. Pricing is $9 a month plus $2 per person with no member cap, so it scales with headcount rather than with a hiring plan. See company intranet alternative if you want the same board to cover general company info too.