Onboarding at Deel: Our Top Strategies Learned from Hypergrowth Hiring

When you’re onboarding thousands of people a year across 110+ countries, you can’t afford to wing it. While we now have a robust onboarding system rooted in new hire experiences, it didn’t start that way.

Early on, we had all the right intentions and inputs, but the experience was stitched together ad hoc. We had a Frankenstein process: helpful pieces but no coherent journey.

We now have the product of deliberate iteration, shaped by feedback, team collaboration, and a deep belief that onboarding should feel intentional, not improvised. We have built a system designed for scale but grounded in human connection.

Here’s how we got there—and what we’ve learned along the way.

The challenge of onboarding at Deel: Hypergrowth in a global remote organization

Before getting into the specifics, it’s worth noting that Deel has very specific onboarding needs shaped by three key factors:

1. We are an organization experiencing hypergrowth. Last quarter alone, we hired over 700 new team members. Our team also grows with M&As, welcoming over a thousand individuals via this route this year alone.
2. We are a truly global organization. As we expand our team, we have team members in over 110 countries and counting. So, we are navigating different time zones, languages, and cultures.
3. We are a fully remote organization. This means there are no in-person or in-office touchpoints within our onboarding world.

Creating cohesion across teams

One of the biggest challenges in scaling onboarding is that many functions contribute, but few see the full picture. Early on, different teams delivered helpful information, but it didn’t feel like Deel was speaking in one voice. New hires were met with a series of disconnected moments: one message from HR, another from IT, and another from their team lead. Nothing was wrong, but nothing felt cohesive.

Now, every part of the onboarding experience is designed to reinforce one message: “You belong here.” That shift—from siloed transactions to a unified experience—has been one of the most transformative changes we’ve made.

Prioritizing connection in the remote world

Remote-first onboarding comes with a particular challenge: without hallways, lunch tables, or chance encounters, connection has to be designed, not left to chance. That means moving beyond checklists and compliance to intentionally creating moments of belonging.

Take our global orientation. Previously, these sessions leaned heavily toward compliance. However, we realized that remote-first onboarding demands more than information—it demands connection.

And the connection doesn’t stop when the call ends. We group new hires into Slack cohorts that stay together throughout their onboarding journey. It’s a lightweight but powerful way to build peer relationships, celebrate milestones, and make asking questions without fear of judgment easier.

We’ve learned that when people connect early, they ramp faster, ask more, and contribute sooner. Remote doesn’t have to mean distant. It just means being intentional about how you bring people in.

The power of preboarding

At Deel, the onboarding experience starts the moment someone says yes to a job offer.
Preboarding helps us do two things at once—reduce first-day anxiety and build excitement.

We’ve learned that small details make a big difference:

• A message from the hiring manager
• A welcome video from the CEO
• Storytelling with our values, how they apply, how they are anchored in, how leadership shows up, and how we expect people to show up at Deal
• Even a simple “Here’s what to expect next” email can go a long way in making a new hire feel seen and supported.

Manager enablement beyond checklists

No matter how good your onboarding content is, it won’t land without manager engagement.

At Deel, we think of onboarding as a team sport—but the manager is the captain. They set the tone, make the first week feel personal, and connect the dots between company-wide onboarding and team-specific work. That’s why we’ve invested heavily in manager enablement.

Our goal is to empower, not burden, team managers and make it easy for them to show up with intention, even when they’re busy. At the end of the day, it’s not the content that makes onboarding great—it’s the people.

From onboarding playbook to ecosystem

We treat onboarding as an ecosystem with modular flows rather than a one-size-fits-all playbook. We design onboarding journeys based on role type (e.g., engineer vs. account manager), contract type (EOR, contractor, direct employee), and geography.

Feedback loops in action

We’re not just designing onboarding—we’re constantly redesigning it. That’s possible because we’ve embedded feedback loops into every stage of the process.

The thread running through it all: Automation with a human touch

At our scale, automation is non-negotiable. But connection is, too.

We use Deel HR to run much of our onboarding process. That includes automated workflows for everything from device provisioning and contract management to Slack workspace invites and pre-scheduled learning assignments.

Automation gives us consistency and scale. But the real magic happens in the human moments we’ve designed around it.

What other companies can learn from Deel, even without our scale

I know this can sound like a lot. And I want to be honest: Deel’s onboarding system is built for our reality—global, complex, and high-volume. But the principles behind it are relevant at any stage.

Here’s what top strategies I’d offer to any team, no matter your size or budget:

Create impactful onboarding experiences with Deel

One of the biggest advantages we have at Deel is that we use our own products. That means we’re not only designing onboarding for global teams—we’re also stress-testing every part of it in real-time.

Deel HR powers every new hire journey we run, and the experience has shaped how our product has evolved. We’ve built the features we wish we had—because we’ve lived the gaps ourselves:

• Custom workflows for everything from preboarding tasks to manager nudges and day-one learning assignments. These flows let us build consistent experiences at scale while still adapting to role, location, and contract type.
• Self-serve learning paths blend video content, written guides, and interactive exercises. We use these to expose new hires to our leadership team, core tools, and global culture—on their own time and in their own timezone.
• Feedback surveys are triggered automatically at key milestones (7, 30, 60, 90 days—or any other timeline of your choice), with insights routed back to People teams for action.
• Manager enablement flows that include onboarding toolkits, automated reminders, and a dedicated manager training module inside Deel Engage.
• Device and software provisioning is managed through Deel IT, so every hire has what they need by day one—whether they’re in Nairobi, New York, or New Delhi.
• And, of course, we have a single Global HRIS where we manage every worker type in every country—employees, contractors, and EOR hires included.

What makes all of this work isn’t just the tools. It’s how we’ve layered thoughtful experience design on top. We use Deel HR to drive automation, consistency, and scale—but we never let it replace the human touch.

If your organization is ready to scale the onboarding process, contact a product specialist to see how Deel can help.