Streamlining Staff Onboarding for Efficiency

Published On: July 15, 2025|

Automating New Starter Onboarding at Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust: Streamlining Recruitment and Improving Workforce Efficiency.

ICS:
North East & Yorkshire ICS

Trust Name:
Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust

Process Name:
Hiring New Starters

Challenge

The Workforce Information team faces significant challenges in managing the high volume of hires, ensuring accuracy of information, and maintaining timely processing.

The manual nature of the process meant that Workforce Information staff had to spend considerable time retrieving new starter details, inputting them into the system, and cross-checking for errors—all of which slowed down the hiring timeline and increased the risk of inaccuracies. Delays in onboarding could lead to workforce shortages, impacting service delivery and staff experience.

By implementing automation, the process now reduces administrative burden, improves data accuracy, and accelerates the hiring cycle, ensuring that new employees can start their roles promptly with minimal manual intervention.

Solution

The Hiring New Starters process is designed to address inefficiencies and delays in the onboarding of new employees within the NHS by automating key administrative tasks. For Tees, Esk and Wear, New starters went live in January 2024, and bank hires followed in March 2024.

Traditionally, hiring new staff involves significant manual data entry, which can be time-consuming, prone to errors, and create delays in getting new employees set up in the system. This process leverages digital workers to retrieve new starter information from an NHS mail inbox, organize the data, and input it into the Electronic Staff Record (ESR). By eliminating manual data handling, the system significantly reduces administrative workload, minimizes errors, and enhances data accuracy.

Additionally, automation speeds up the hiring process, reducing the time it takes for new employees to be fully onboarded and operational. The improved access to real-time data not only supports better workforce planning and decision-making but also enhances the overall experience for recruitment / workforce information teams and new employees. Ultimately, this process increases workforce capability, improves efficiency, and ensures a smoother, more effective hiring experience across the organisation.

Increase Efficiency

Speeds up onboarding

Reduces administrative workload

Reduces Clinical Risk

Minimises errors, boosts accuracy

Boosts Workforce Morale and Capability

Enhances workforce planning

Scott Rogers – Workforce Information Manager, Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust.

“The need was identified when my service manager asked to identify areas that could potentially be viable use of the RPA. We looked at all our processes, to find the most time consuming, also the most monotonous, and hiring new starters onto ESR was the one we thought would be the biggest saving process in working hours.

There have been 2013 new starters hired onto a ESR by the automation since go live, this has allowed us to devote our time to other tasks that we are responsible for. Since the automation has gone live, our team have not just found themselves more productive, but we find that our admin staff are happier in the job as well because they spend more of their time doing more engaging work and less of the monotony.”

Stuart Macmillan – Senior Associate, e18 Innovation

“This project is a textbook example of how automation can deliver on the government’s core productivity agenda. By streamlining onboarding and eliminating repetitive admin, TEWV has freed up valuable HR capacity, improved data quality, and accelerated time to hire. These are exactly the kinds of improvements the government is calling for in corporate services—and they’re now live, measurable, and repeatable.”

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