Automation works for provisioning, document collection, and scheduling. It fails for moments that shape belonging. The 70/30 split we recommend.
Seventy per cent of onboarding is logistics. Laptop, accounts, IDs, first-week scheduling, policy acknowledgements. Automate all of it. Your new hire should not be filling out the same form four times in four systems.
The other thirty per cent is about belonging. The manager 1:1 on day one. The buddy introduction. The first cross-functional coffee. Don't let automation touch these. A Slack bot sending a generic 'Welcome, new hire!' on day one does more damage than no message at all.