Your New Employee Just Started—But IT Didn’t Get the Memo

Modern employers want to provide a warm, personalized welcome for every new hire who joins the organization. Some of the best employers offer onboarding buddies, virtual coffee chats, and a culture toolkit in the onboarding portal so new employees can immediately get up to speed on the company vibe.

All of these thoughtful cultural touches matter on a new hire’s first day. But none will make up for the frustration of not receiving a laptop on time or speaking to a frazzled IT team that didn’t even know someone new was starting today.

Onboarding is where Human Resources and IT should move in lockstep, but in many companies, these teams operate in silos. The result? Confusion, delays, wasted spending, and a poor first impression.

This guide dives into what happens when onboarding breaks down due to misalignment between IT and HR and why automation is the only scalable way to fix it.

Why IT bottlenecks are the silent killer of onboarding

The employment contracts are signed; HR sends the welcome letter, schedules the onboarding calls, and gets all the paperwork in order. The new hire even shows up (virtually or in person) on time for their first day.

For HR, onboarding looks complete. But for IT, it often starts as a surprise — the chaos is just beginning as they weren't aware of the new hire’s arrival. Without notice, context, or time to prep, the team must get the new hire set up while juggling everything else on their plate. Here’s what the result of this misalignment between HR and IT looks like:

• The late laptop problem: Devices aren't shipped on time, so the employee starts their job without the one tool they need to do it. They can't start contributing to the team or the overall company until they receive their kit.
• The lockout nightmare: Even once the hardware shows up, without any credentials, the new hire has zero access to systems, communications, or documentation. IT support tickets pile up as the new hire sits idle.
• The over-access disaster: In a rush to unblock them, IT grants broad permissions “just to get them going,” creating dangerous access creep and potential IT compliance risks.

Each of these breakdowns can also shape how new hires perceive their tools and environment. If IT is brought in late, there’s no time to check everything is functioning properly or that the new joiner knows how to use their systems. According to Digitate’s Super CIO report, one in six new hires found their assigned systems difficult to use, and 22% said they were confused about how to proceed during onboarding, which is a direct outcome of poorly coordinated tech handoffs.

The hidden costs of IT onboarding failures

When IT isn’t involved in the onboarding process early enough, every misstep becomes an expensive problem. Here are some of the issues and associated expenses you can expect:

Lost productivity and disengagement

The cost of your new hire kicks in long before their first payroll cycle. Sourcing, screening, and hiring costs add up to an average of $4,700 per employee, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. But some professionals estimate the real cost is three to four times the employee’s annual salary when you factor in training, ramp time, and internal resources.

Naturally, you’ll want your employees to ramp up and start being productive as soon as possible. But that’s impossible if they don’t have the basic tools to do their job. Shockingly, only 35% of employees say they have the materials and equipment they need to work effectively, according to Gallup, suggesting this is a widespread issue rather than a few isolated incidents.

It’s no surprise, then, that new hires who face early IT frustrations quickly lose motivation. In fact, 29% of employees have quit a job within the first 90 days, often due to poor onboarding experience. In this scenario, employers are now stuck with the cost of replacing someone they just spent thousands of dollars hiring in the first place.

IT burnout

It’s not just new employees that feel disheartened by the onboarding experience. IT teams also struggle with the flood of last-minute requests, the stress of chasing down devices and configuring accounts, and urgent access issues they should’ve solved days earlier. The constant state of firefighting can take its toll.

Zooming in on IT security alone, 74% of cybersec professionals say they’ve taken time off due to work-related mental well-being issues. On average, they lose 3.4 hours of productivity per month, adding up to more than five working days each year due to burnout-related slowdowns. This costs medium to large enterprises over $626 million per year in the US and £130 million in the UK.

Burnout goes beyond having a tired, lackluster IT team; it also results in slower response times, more mistakes, and rising attrition in one of your most critical departments.

Security risks

When IT is rushed or looped in too late, speed is favored over precision as the only way to play catch-up. And that's when access management starts to slip, as new hires receive broader permissions without the usual checks and balances. In some cases, they're granted access to sensitive systems they don't need because it's faster than provisioning tools individually. While this approach might seem harmless in the moment, this kind of access creep also invites serious compliance and data security risks.

At the other end of the employee lifecycle, poor coordination and manual processes also mean that access sometimes isn’t revoked correctly when someone leaves the company. In fact, 31% of ex-employees still have access to company SaaS applications after they’ve offboarded. This type of liability throws open the doors to data leaks and unauthorized file downloads, and can land your company in hot water with compliance auditors.

All these issues come at a significant cost to your organization. For example, according to GDPR laws, businesses can be fined up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.

Your company’s data is only as secure as your last forgotten login, stressing the importance of keeping provisioning and de-provisioning tightly controlled and automated from day one.

Unnecessary IT spend

IT onboarding failures often show up as wasted spend, particularly when it comes to purchasing hardware inventory. Without clear visibility into what equipment is available, teams end up buying new laptops by default, even when perfectly usable devices are available in storage or with recently offboarded employees.

This kind of unnecessary purchasing is easy to overlook, especially when responsibility is split across HR, IT, and finance. But over time, it creates real inefficiencies.

It's a clear example of how fragmented workflows and poor asset tracking can quietly erode budgets without anyone realizing until the spend is already sunk, and how quickly they can be saved with the right systems in place.

Why manual IT provisioning is a scaling nightmare

Manual IT provisioning might work when you’re onboarding a handful of employees. But it quickly becomes unmanageable as your team grows across time zones, functions, and continents.

The typical process is something of a patchwork and looks like this:

• HR emails IT to inform them of a new hire starting on a particular date. Of course, if they forget, the process falls apart immediately
• IT rushes to place equipment orders and configure devices
• IT chases down shipping delays for late laptops
• The new hire starts their job, but security access is still being pieced together in the background

This model creates delays and locks your IT team into a reactive loop where they constantly respond to urgent requests instead of building scalable systems. The more headcount you add, the more chaos you introduce.

Manual onboarding is also incredibly laborious. According to research from Cerby and the Ponemon Institute, organizations spend an average of seven hours provisioning access for each new employee and a further eight hours de-provisioning access when they leave.

It’s no surprise that forward-thinking companies are looking for a better way. In fact, our data finds that 28% of HR leaders are already leaning on AI to improve onboarding workflows. And that number is only expected to rise, because no matter how good your culture is or how strong your hiring brand, a broken backend process will catch up with you. Manual provisioning might seem like a small detail, but it becomes a major drag on IT, people teams, and new employees when left unaddressed at scale.

The role of automation—how IT becomes a strategic enabler

Automation lets IT build onboarding infrastructure that actually scales, without burning out your team or budget. And from a people perspective, it means every new hire hits the ground running as soon as they’ve received their warm welcome to your company. Syncing vital workflows between HR and IT so they run seamlessly in the background allows you to scale up or down in line with your business needs while saving tons of time and resources.

Here’s how automation could work in your organization:

• HRIS integration loops in IT teams instantly. As soon as HR creates a new employee record in the HRIS, the system kicks off provisioning workflows with no manual nudges required.
• Check stock levels before buying new hardware. Automations can flag available or refurbished devices across your network before triggering a new order, helping you reuse assets, cut procurement delays, and reduce waste.
• Equipment is pre-configured and shipped ahead of day one. Devices arrive ready to go, removing the lag between start date and productivity.
• Auto-assign software licenses based on role templates. Whether it’s an engineer in Berlin or a marketer in Austin, automation gives the employee the precise permissions they need based on their role.
• Adjust provisioning by work model. Use automation to differentiate setup and compliance needs for remote, hybrid, and onsite employees—from shipping logistics to local device prep.
• Build conditional workflows for security compliance. Automatically assign MFA, encryption, or MDM profiles based on location, department, or device type, with no manual oversight required.
• Monitor IT asset usage over time. Track device performance, flag underutilized machines, and surface redeployment opportunities, without combing through spreadsheets.

Deel IT: A smarter way to equip new employees

The only way to prevent IT onboarding failures at scale is to eliminate manual handoffs, last-minute scrambling, and security risks. Deel IT bridges the gap between HR and IT, ensuring that provisioning happens on time, every time, without relying on reactive communication.

• IT provisioning starts automatically: Instead of waiting for HR to send an email, Deel IT syncs with HRIS platforms so IT setups begin as soon as a hire is confirmed.
• Devices arrive ready to go: Laptops and other equipment are shipped pre-configured, reducing setup time and ensuring employees have what they need from day one.
• Access is granted securely, without delays: Role-based provisioning ensures that new hires get the tools they need—nothing more, nothing less—while automated offboarding prevents security gaps.
• IT teams get full visibility into assets: Instead of over-purchasing devices, IT can track, reassign, and recover equipment globally, optimizing budgets and reducing waste.

By replacing manual processes with automation, Deel IT allows IT and HR teams to focus on strategic work rather than fixing onboarding mistakes. Book a demo today and see it for yourself.