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Onboarding is broken at scale. Every new hire means another round of the same meetings: company overview, benefits walkthrough, tool setup, policy explanations. HR and L&D teams find themselves repeating the same information over and over, while new hires sit through back-to-back Zoom calls trying to absorb everything at once.
The problem gets worse as teams grow or become more distributed. Scheduling across time zones becomes a logistical nightmare. Different trainers deliver information inconsistently. New hires feel overwhelmed. And the people responsible for onboarding burn out from the repetition.
Video-based onboarding solves this. It lets you record information once and reuse it forever, without sacrificing the human element that makes onboarding effective. Here's how to build a scalable onboarding system that doesn't rely on filling every new hire's calendar with meetings.
Go through your existing onboarding schedule and identify which meetings are purely informational versus truly interactive. If it's mostly one person talking and explaining, it's a candidate for video. If it's discussion, feedback, or relationship-building, keep it live.
Some content translates to video more naturally than others. Start with:
Don't overscript or try to make it perfect. The goal is helpful, not polished. Keep videos short, ideally 5-10 minutes per topic. Use a conversational tone. Show your face when it makes sense, it builds connection. If you're walking through a process, share your screen and talk through it like you would in a live meeting.
Create a centralized hub where new hires can find everything. This could be in your LMS, a shared folder, or an onboarding portal. Group videos by topic or organize them by day or week of onboarding. Make navigation intuitive. If someone needs to find the benefits video again two weeks later, they should be able to locate it in seconds.
This is crucial. Video replaces the informational meetings, but you still need live interaction. Use video for content delivery, then schedule shorter live meetings for Q&A, mentorship, and team introductions. Instead of a 60-minute benefits meeting where 50 minutes is explanation and 10 is questions, flip it. New hires watch the video beforehand, and the live meeting is 20 minutes of answering their specific questions.
After each onboarding cohort, ask new hires what worked and what didn't. Were the videos clear? Was anything missing? Did they feel connected to the team despite fewer live meetings? Use this feedback to refine your content. Update videos when processes change. Track which videos people are actually watching to identify gaps or areas of confusion.
Moving to video-based onboarding doesn't mean eliminating all meetings. It means being intentional about which meetings add value and which are just information dumps that could be delivered more efficiently.
The teams that make this shift successfully are the ones that stop treating video as a substitute for human connection and start treating it as a tool that frees up time for better human connection.
Start small. Pick one meeting from your onboarding process this week and turn it into a video. See how it goes. Refine it. Then do another one. Over time, you'll build a library of reusable content that scales with your team without burning out your onboarding staff.
Ready to start building a scalable onboarding system? Tools like Castify make it easy to record, organize, and share onboarding videos without a learning curve.
