The slow part of onboarding documentation is writing it from memory. Skip that: record yourself doing the setup once in the browser, and let Spion reconstruct the clicks, fields and navigation into a clean step-by-step guide. You correct anything it misread, export to PDF, and you have a doc the next hire follows without asking you a single question.
Why onboarding docs are always out of date
Every team has a folder of onboarding documents that nobody trusts. They were written in a rush by whoever onboarded the last person, they describe a tool version that no longer exists, and they skip the three steps that everyone assumes are obvious. New hires read them, get stuck, and message someone on day two anyway.
The reason is structural. Writing a good SOP from a blank page is genuinely hard work. You have to remember every click, describe each field, and anticipate where someone might go wrong — all while not actually doing the task. So people half-write it, or they don't write it at all and just walk the new person through it live. That live walkthrough works once and then evaporates.
The fix is to stop separating doing the task from documenting the task. If the act of completing the setup also produces the documentation, the doc is accurate by construction and it costs you almost nothing extra.
What "record once" actually means
Onboarding is mostly a sequence of browser-based setup steps: create the account, add them to the right groups, configure the dashboard, grant access to the shared drive, set up the email signature, join the relevant channels. Each of these is a repeatable path through a web app.
Recording once means you run through that path a single time — ideally while genuinely onboarding someone, so nothing is staged — and a tool captures what you did. Not a video you'd have to watch end to end, but a structured record of each action: which page, which button, which field, what you typed. That structured record is what becomes the guide.
- Capture — you perform the setup in your browser as normal while recording runs in the background.
- Reconstruction — the recording is turned into discrete, ordered steps with the context attached, not a wall of raw events.
- Output — those steps become a readable guide or PDF, or an automation if the step can run unattended.
This is the core idea behind automation discovery: the hard part was never the writing, it was capturing the workflow accurately. Once you have an accurate capture, turning it into a doc is trivial.
The step-by-step approach
Here is how to build a full onboarding pack without ever staring at a blank document.
1. List the setup tasks, not the prose
Before recording anything, write a one-line list of the discrete setup tasks a new hire needs. Examples: "Create Google Workspace account", "Add to engineering GitHub team", "Configure CRM dashboard view", "Set up shared drive access". Keep each one small. A task that involves two unrelated tools should be two recordings, because someone will eventually need to redo one without the other.
2. Record each task once, end to end
Start the recording, do the task exactly as you would for a real hire, then stop. Don't narrate, don't slow down, don't skip the boring confirmation screen — that confirmation screen is often where the next person gets confused. The goal is a faithful capture of the real path, including any "wait for the invite email" or "refresh until it appears" moments.
3. Review and correct the reconstruction
Once the recording becomes a draft guide, read it as if you were the new hire. Tighten step titles, remove any accidental detours, and add a short note where judgement is needed — "choose the EU region if they're based in Europe". This review is where your knowledge gets added, and it takes minutes rather than the hour a from-scratch SOP would.
4. Export and place it where people look
Export each guide as a PDF or a shareable step-by-step doc, then put them in one obvious onboarding folder or wiki page. The format matters less than the location: a perfect doc nobody can find is no better than no doc. If you want the longer treatment on this, see turning a screen recording into a step-by-step guide.
5. Re-record instead of editing when tools change
When an interface changes, don't patch the old doc. Re-record the task. It takes the same few minutes and produces something accurate, whereas editing prose to match a redesigned screen is fiddly and error-prone. Cheap re-recording is what keeps the pack alive long-term.
What goes in the guide versus what gets automated
Recording each task gives you a choice you didn't have before. Some onboarding steps still need a human — granting access tied to a manager's approval, or anything involving a personal decision. Those become guides the new hire or their lead follows. Other steps are pure mechanical setup that could run unattended, and those can become automations exported to Make, Zapier, n8n or Claude.
| Onboarding task | Best output | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Configure a dashboard the way the team likes it | Step-by-step guide | Visual and preference-driven; the hire learns by doing it |
| Add user to standard groups and tools | Automation | Repetitive and identical for every hire |
| Set up email signature and profile | Guide or PDF | Personal content the hire fills in themselves |
| Grant access requiring manager sign-off | Guide | Needs human judgement and approval |
You don't have to decide this upfront. Record everything, then look at the captured steps and split them. The recording is the same artefact either way — it can become a guide a person follows or an automation a tool runs.
The best onboarding doc is a by-product of doing the onboarding, not a separate project you keep meaning to start.
Why this beats writing SOPs the usual way
A traditional SOP project starts well and stalls. Someone is assigned to "document onboarding", they write three tasks beautifully, get pulled onto something urgent, and the rest stays in their head. The pack is permanently 30% complete.
Recording flips the economics. Because each task costs minutes rather than the better part of an hour, completing the full pack is realistic. Because the capture is the real path, you don't get the "it doesn't match the screen" problem that makes people abandon docs. And because anyone can record — not just the strongest writer on the team — the documentation isn't bottlenecked on one person's free afternoon. If you're formalising this more broadly, our process documentation guide covers how recorded steps fit into a wider documentation practice, and how to create an SOP walks through the structure.
A realistic first week
Pick the next person joining your team. As you set them up, record each task. By the end of their first day you'll have a draft pack covering most of onboarding, captured from the live process rather than reconstructed from memory. Spend twenty minutes tidying the steps, export to PDF, and the person after them follows the doc instead of interrupting you. Each subsequent hire either refines the pack or proves it works — both are useful.
For more setups worth recording once — customer onboarding, reporting, internal handoffs — browse the use cases.
How Spion fits
Spion is a free Chrome extension built for exactly this. You record an onboarding task once in the browser, and Spion reconstructs it into a clean, ordered step-by-step guide — each click, field and page captured with context, not a raw screen recording you'd have to watch back. You review and correct the draft, then export it as a PDF or shareable guide for new hires to follow.
When a step is mechanical enough to run without a human, the same recording can be exported as a ready-to-run automation to Claude, Workato, Make, Zapier or n8n instead. The hard part of documentation — capturing the workflow accurately — is handled by recording once. Everything downstream, whether it's a guide or an automation, comes from that single capture. Install it, onboard your next hire as normal, and let the documentation build itself.