“Our onboarding process relied heavily on manual coordination between recruiters and me,” said Candyse James, HR Talent Sourcing, Onboarding, and Engagement Lead in Student and Campus Life. “I was tracking new hires in Trello and manually sending a series of emails based on where they were in the process. It was time‑consuming and, at times, inconsistent.”

Because the process depended on manual triggers, everything slowed—or stopped—when James was out of the office. During high‑volume hiring periods, labor‑intensive steps also increased the risk of bottlenecks, delays, or missed touchpoints.

What started as a simple effort to save time soon became an opportunity to rethink how the department welcomes new employees and sets them up for success.

From Manual Work to Meaningful Automation

Building her first automation took approximately 20–30 hours. By working on it incrementally over several weeks, James was able to test ideas, make adjustments, and refine the automation while the existing process continued in parallel. Once implemented, the results were immediate: what had taken 5–7 hours each week was reduced to about 15 minutes.

Encouraged by that success, James began applying the same approach to other HR processes. These expansions included automating minimum wage increase notifications and the temporary employee extension process. In that workflow, supervisors receive an automated email with a form to indicate whether they wish to extend an employee. Their response then triggers a memo that’s automatically generated and sent directly to the employee when appropriate.

One of the biggest surprises for James was how approachable the work turned out to be.

“It doesn’t require a long development cycle or specialized technical resources,” she said. “Just a willingness to start small, test, and refine along the way. It really highlighted how accessible this type of work can be for teams across the university.”

Lessons for Other Cornell Staff

Reflecting on her experience, James shared a few tips for other teams interested in exploring automation—regardless of the tools they use:

• Start with a clearly defined, repeatable process. Simple, high‑impact use cases are easier to automate and help build confidence quickly.
• Use automation to support—not replace—existing processes. Streamlining steps like communications, tracking, or time‑based triggers makes automation more practical and sustainable.
• Design for flexibility. Making it easy to update content or timing ensures the process can continue to evolve.

“In many ways,” she noted, “the process improvement itself has been just as impactful as the time savings.”

Impact Beyond Efficiency

After attending an event called Transforming HR for the Future, hosted by the ILR Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies, which included presentations from Fortune 500 companies on how they have incorporated AI in their HR work —both inspiring and a bit intimidating—James and her supervisor, Cassie Palladino, began brainstorming ways to streamline some of their own labor‑intensive processes.

Palladino, Student and Campus Life’s HR Project & Initiatives Specialist, encouraged James to continue exploring Power Automate as a way to improve efficiency and consistency, particularly for onboarding communications.

“These communications with new hires and their managers are critical to creating a welcoming, organized, and consistent onboarding experience,” Palladino said. “My primary hope was that automation would reduce the administrative burden, allowing Candyse and our recruiters to focus on more value‑added work without compromising quality. That outcome has been fully realized.”

What surprised her most was the positive ripple effect across the HR team, as growing curiosity led to additional brainstorming and new ideas. “The success of this solution has generated more interest in using AI and automation in other areas of our work,” said Palladino. “It has empowered team members to explore new tools, collaborate more intentionally, and feel more confident taking thoughtful, responsible risks.”

Learn more about creating automations with Power Automate, one of the tools in the Microsoft 365 Productivity Bundle.