Purpose
Introductions allow you to save time and automate your workflow when introducing new hires to other employees in the company.
If you choose the General New Hire Onboarding Journey template, Suggest 5 Introductions for your new hire is a templated step that you can choose to edit by clicking on the drafted step.
Alternatively, you could click Create a new step on the bottom of the page, select Introduction and give your step a title to customize it.
Task Details
Like other Journey steps, the Introduction step includes a From and To field, in addition to a Task Name and Instructions field.
The From field will correspond to who is sending the message from the Instructions field. Usually this will be a Journey Admin, but this can be customized to represent the person who would normally source these introductions.
The To field will correspond to who should suggest the employees that the new hire should meet with. Often this is the new hire’s manager.
The Task Name field is what assignees will see when the task is assigned to them. You can also use variables to personalize the title of the Task to the recipient!
The Instructions field will contain the instructions for the Task owner. This can also be customized with variables for repeatable, scalable tasks!
- In the below example, the Journey Admin is instructing the Manager of the new hire to begin setting up introductions.
Variables
Like other Journey Steps, you can also add variables to the Task name, as well as to the content in the Instructions field! If you click View all variables you’ll be able to scroll through and see an extensive list of the different variables you can use in your messaging.
You can click on the 
Scheduling
Next, you’ll choose when to trigger this step and assign a due date. You can choose to trigger this step either at a specific time, or after a previous step has been completed.
If choosing At a specific time, you can adjust the variables so the step triggers before/after/on the new hire’s start date or upon onboarding buddy assignment.
Similarly, you can customize a due date for the Task owner before/after/on the new hire’s start date or upon an onboarding buddy assignment.
Note: These times are relative to the timezone displayed, not necessarily in the time zone of the employee on the journey.
If choosing After step has been completed, you can set this step to trigger immediately once a selected step has been completed, or a certain amount of days after the selected step has been completed.
You’ll also choose a due date for the task owner, with timing customizable and dependent on the chosen step’s completion.
Calendar Meeting Details
If you have a Google or Microsoft Calendar integration enabled, you'll have the option to let Cleary automatically schedule calendar invites when introductions have been submitted. We recommend choosing this option to optimize your time savings.
If choosing Yes, Cleary will look for mutual availability for each employee to schedule an introduction. By default, we’ll search between the hours of 9am to 5pm for each employee. If we lack time zone information for either person, we will default to the Time Zone entered in this section.
You can also control the meeting duration, and how many introductions Cleary should schedule for that employee in a single day. Each employee will be able to reschedule the meetings if needed.
Using the Calendar Event Name and Calendar Event Description fields, you’ll be able to customize the calendar event between the designated colleagues and the new hire. Similar to the instructions field, you can use variables to customize the messaging as well!
If you’ve opted out of having Cleary automatically schedule calendar invites, Cleary will still send a communication to both the selected colleagues and the new hire, prompting them to introduce themselves.
Since this will be a manual process, be sure to reflect your preferred process by editing the Notification Subject Line and Notification Description.
Advanced Settings
Notification Channel
By customizing the Notification Channel in Advanced Settings, You can choose to enable notifications for these Introductions in email, Slack, or Microsoft teams.
- Related Article: Slack Integration
Below you’ll see an example of a notification for the non-new colleague:
Error Handling
If the first option is selected, a new hire will be added to this step even if they’re added to the journey after the step should have been triggered.
- For example: You’ve chosen to schedule this step 2 days before the new hire start date, but the new hire wasn’t added to the journey until 1 day before their start date. Enabling this option will ensure they’re added to the meeting even though it falls after the 2 day trigger.
If the second option is selected, the task will not be assigned if the variables used in the content fields do not have a matching record in Cleary.
- For example: If I add {new_hire_city} as a variable in the Notification Description field, but the city does not exist in the new hire’s user field in Cleary, this task will not be assigned and you will be alerted as such.
Audience Targeting
By default, every new hire will be added to the Introduction step when published. However, you can choose to restrict this step to a certain audience.
- For example: If you don’t want contractors to be added to this step, you can set up the audience like so:
Finally, once you’ve configured this step to your liking, you can click Task Preview on the top right to view a preview of what the task will look like to who it is assigned to:
Finally, click Save as Draft or Publish on the bottom right of the page to save your introduction!
- If the step is saved as a draft, it will not be live when the Journey is published. You must click Publish to ensure the step is live once the Journey is.
Employee and New Hire Experience
Once the step and journey are lived, the task assignee (usually the new hire’s manager) will receive a task to choose introductions for the new hire. Here’s an example:
If automatic scheduling is enabled, the task assignee will see details of the sent invites once the colleagues have been selected. If successful, notifications and calendar invites will be sent to the new hire and employee.
Email notification to existing employee:
Calendar invite example that the new hire will receive:
In the case of a lack of mutual availability, an error state as above will be shown on the task view, and the new hire and employee will receive a notification to initiate the scheduling themselves:
Notification to existing employee:
Additionally, if the new hire does not yet have a company email address, invites won't go out.
We'll attempt to retry this scheduling every 24 hours until the events are schedule, there is an error due to lack of mutual availability, or until 14 days after the new hire's start date.
If you chose to not have Cleary schedule the calendar events automatically, we’ll simply send each pair of introductions a notification. The successful delivery of those notifications will be displayed to you in the task detail view:
FAQ
Q: When do meetings get scheduled?
A: Invites are triggered to be sent out once a company email has been set in Cleary for the new hire.