Introduction

A new hire’s first few weeks are a critical period of immense potential and considerable risk. Get it right, and you have an engaged, productive team member ready to contribute. Get it wrong, and you’re left with a disoriented employee, a frustrated team, and a significant drain on productivity.

The key to success is a comprehensive onboarding guide, a single source of truth that translates a team’s complex web of processes, tools, and norms into a clear, actionable roadmap.

But for most teams, creating such a guide is a monumental task. Employees juggle a wide range of daily tasks, but documenting what they do and how they do it is rarely one of them. Furthermore, critical information is rarely centralized; it's scattered across emails and Slack channels, buried in process documents, fragmented in meeting notes, and locked in the minds of busy subject matter experts.

In other words, how can the team capture “what we know” in an easy-to-use document for the new employee?

What if you could automatically generate a tailored, in-depth, up-to-date onboarding guide for any team simply by pointing to your existing company documents?

In this blog post, we explore how Vectara’s Enterprise Deep Research, previously introduced in this blog post, transforms this daunting task into a strategic advantage, ensuring every new hire is aligned and effective from day one.

Why Scattered Knowledge Hurts Teams

Why is onboarding so often a source of friction?

The problem isn't a lack of information, but its chaotic distribution and organization. The "unwritten rules" and standard operating procedures that govern a team's daily life exist in a dynamic set of digital assets, making it nearly impossible for new employees to build a coherent picture.

Many teams have a process for this: they put together a page on Notion or SharePoint that has some onboarding notes and links. This usually requires pulling many team members away from their other important responsibilities. There are a few big issues here:

1. The team is losing valuable time that it could be using to get actual work done.
2. Individual team members usually only see part of the puzzle. Without a centralized source of truth, important knowledge slips through the cracks.
3. A team's "standard" practices can change and evolve, so the old norm may be completely irrelevant today.
4. None of these processes scale.

A team could spend 100 hours creating a beautiful guide of everything they do, and it may be useless a month later. It's an inefficient, unscalable model that hinders team alignment and slows down the crucial ramp-up period for new talent.

We can all use a more efficient way to assemble this information automatically into a comprehensive and useful onboarding guide.

Automating Team Alignment at GitLab Finance

To demonstrate how this works in real life, we used GitLab’s publicly available handbook and used Vectara Enterprise Deep Research to create an onboarding guide for the finance team. You can imagine how this could work with information from your company's internal documents and systems.

When a new finance employee is hired at GitLab, they are likely placed into one of the department's subteams: procurement, tax, or financial planning and analysis (FP&A). A new employee would want to first focus on learning the standard practices and procedures for their subteam before expanding to broader information from other areas within the finance department. For this reason, we created separate onboarding guides for each subteam in the finance department, using the following prompt structure as input to Vectara Enterprise Deep Research:

Create a comprehensive onboarding guide for a newly hired, entry-level member to the <SUBTEAM NAME> Team within the Finance Department at GitLab. The guide should help the employee learn all of the standard processes and procedures as a member of the <SUBTEAM NAME> Team. Include a ‘Resources’ section at the end of the guide so that the new team member can quickly access relevant documents should they want to further explore any topics presented in the onboarding guide.

And then we let Enterprise Deep Research do its magic.

It deploys multiple research assistants to thoroughly search the finance department’s documents and extract the most relevant information. The head researcher then compiles the output from all research assistants into a digestible onboarding guide.

We won't show the full guides here because they are quite long, but we'll highlight one section, and if you want to check out all of the guides, you can refer to this folder. One of the most important things a new employee should understand is their core responsibilities, the tasks they’ll be expected to perform on a daily basis. This section must be comprehensive, ensuring nothing essential is overlooked so that new hires can start off strong.

Here's what Vectara Enterprise Deep Research generated for a new member on the procurement team:

Core Procurement Workflow and Lifecycle

Step 1: Initiating a Purchase Request

• All purchase requests begin in Zip, GitLab’s internal procurement request system accessed via Okta.
• Requesters submit detailed requests, attaching supporting documents such as contracts or quotes.
• Zip supports various request types: new spend under $25,000, renewals, change requests, $0 contract reviews, partner revenue payments, individual software purchases, and termination notices.

Step 2: Approval Workflow

• Requests route through multi-level approvals involving FP&A, management, Security, Privacy, and Legal as needed.
• Approval timelines vary from 5 days to over 3 weeks depending on complexity and vendor status.
• Urgent requests (<5 business days) require clear business impact justification and escalation via Slack.

Step 3: Purchase Order Generation and Order Placement

• Upon approval, Coupa generates the official Purchase Order (PO).
• Suppliers receive the PO and payment instructions, submitting invoices referencing the PO number.
• For some purchases, virtual one-time use credit cards are issued; receipts must be forwarded to Accounts Payable.

Step 4: Invoice Submission and Review

• Vendors submit invoices via Coupa Supplier Portal or email (ap@gitlab.com).
• Requesters review invoices for accuracy before approval.
• All invoices and receipts are sent to Accounts Payable for payment processing.

Step 5: Payment Processing

• Payments are made weekly, typically net 60 days from invoice receipt.
• Preferred payment methods include Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) or virtual cards.

Mandatory Procurement Engagement Points

• Procurement must be engaged before any purchase or contract agreement, especially for spend over $25,000 or new vendors.
• RFPs are required for new spend, vendor changes, or renewals after three years, scaled by spend amount.

As you can see, this section provides a clear, structured overview of the procurement process that helps new team members quickly understand their role and responsibilities. It outlines not only what tasks they will perform but also when and how to perform them, which tools they’ll use (like Zip and Coupa), and which cross-functional teams they’ll interact with (such as FP&A, Legal, and Accounts Payable). By mapping out each step of the workflow, this guide helps eliminate ambiguity and empowers new hires to contribute with confidence from day one.

Another critical aspect to emphasize is the source of the information presented. In total, content from seven different pages of GitLab’s handbook was used to construct this section. In some cases, individual bullet points generated by Enterprise Deep Research were drawn from multiple sources. For example:

• Urgent requests (<5 business days) require clear business impact justification and escalation via Slack.

The procurement team has information about urgent requests on two different pages. If an employee only looked at the main page, they would miss an important detail defining how many business days qualify a request as urgent, information that can only be found on the field marketing and events page. This illustrates how vital information is often fragmented across internal documentation.

Consider another example:

• All invoices and receipts are sent to Accounts Payable for payment processing.

This procedure involves coordination with other subteams within the finance department and is documented only on the accounting page. If this guide relied solely on procurement-related files, such steps would be omitted, potentially leading to communication breakdowns between procurement and accounting.

Since you can ingest virtually any data source into Vectara, the guide can draw on a complete and accurate picture of team processes by pulling relevant context from Google Drive, SharePoint, Slack, email, and more.

Conclusion

The frantic scramble to onboard a new team member is a clear symptom of a much larger challenge: the disorganization and inaccessibility of critical enterprise knowledge. For too long, teams have accepted the high cost of this scattered information, either by burdening their experts with repetitive training or by undertaking the slow, manual process of creating documentation from scratch.

As demonstrated with the GitLab Finance team, Enterprise Deep Research transforms this digital archaeology into an automated, strategic process. It intelligently sifts through vast repositories of information to distill exactly what a new hire needs to know. By providing a clear, curated starting point, complete with vital resources and communication channels, you can ensure new employees are aligned with best practices from day one.

If you'd like to learn more about how to use Vectara Enterprise Deep Research to solve your onboarding and knowledge management challenges, please contact our team for a demo.