Staff onboarding¶

“Onboarding” in Midsummer covers everything between someone wants to help and they’re on a department roster with their paperwork done. There are three ways in — applying to an open position, being invited by email, and being added directly by leadership — and they all converge on the same place: department membership plus a set of onboarding records to complete.

The pipeline at a glance ¶

A department posts an open position (or HR sends an invitation).
A candidate applies; the application goes to the department’s queue.
Department leadership reviews it and forwards it to HR (or rejects it).
HR gives final approval. The person is added to the department roster as staff or volunteer, their onboarding records are created, and a welcome email goes out (if configured).
The new staffer completes their onboarding forms at My Onboarding; leadership tracks progress on the roster and can send reminders.

Note

“HR” here has a precise meaning: leadership of a department that owns the Staff module with admin privileges. See HR & permissions.

For applicants ¶

Finding and applying to positions ¶

Open positions are listed on the Staff module home page (Job Openings). You need an account to apply — the page will walk you through signing in or creating one. (Organizers can optionally make the listings visible to signed-out visitors, but applying always requires an account.)

The application form asks for your name, preferred name, pronouns, email, phone, experience, availability, why you want the role, and anything else you’d like to add. Each position is posted as either a staff or volunteer role.

A few rules:

You can apply to a position once.
Positions can carry an application cap; once enough applications are in (or the position is closed), it stops accepting new ones.
An application can only be changed while it is still Pending Review — once leadership forwards it to HR it is locked. If you need to correct or withdraw one, contact the department.

What happens to your application ¶

Applications move through a two-stage review:

Status	Meaning
Pending Review	Waiting for the department’s leadership.
Pending HR	Leadership approved; waiting for HR’s final sign-off.
Approved	You’re in — you’ve been added to the department roster.
Rejected	Declined (by either stage).

When you’re approved you may receive a welcome email, and you’ll see the department appear on your staff dashboard.

Completing your onboarding ¶

Once you’re on a roster, any onboarding the event requires shows up at Staff → My Onboarding (the dashboard also shows an amber “You have N onboarding item(s) to complete” card until you’re done).

Each onboarding item is a short wizard — one step per question — with a progress bar. Steps can include text to read, questions to answer, links you must actually open (for example a code of conduct), a signature pad, and a profile details step that fills in your account profile. You can’t skip ahead past an incomplete step. Press Submit on the last step to finish.

Completed items stay visible with a View / Edit button, so you can go back and update your answers if something changes.

Accepting an invitation ¶

If HR invites you directly, you’ll get an email with a personal link. The link:

shows you what you’re being invited to (department, role, event) — with your email partially masked until you sign in;
asks you to sign in (or create an account) with the email address the invitation was sent to — a different account will be turned away;
adds you to the department the moment you confirm. If you’re already signed in with the right address, this happens automatically.

Invitations expire — by default after 14 days (the email shows the date). If yours has expired or was cancelled, ask HR to send a new one.

For department leadership ¶

Posting positions ¶

From your department card on the staff dashboard, open Open Positions to create and manage postings. A posting has a name, description, a position type (staff or volunteer — this decides which roster list an approved applicant joins), an active toggle, an optional application cap, and an optional closing date.

Tip

The active toggle is what actually stops applications. Flip it off when a position is filled or past its closing date.

Reviewing applications ¶

Your department card shows a Review Applications button with a pending count. For each application you can:

Approve — adds your review notes and forwards it to HR (“Application has been forwarded to HR for final review”).
Reject — with notes. Leadership can still reject an application that is already sitting in the HR queue.

You never add the person to the roster yourself from an application — that happens at HR approval, so there is always a second set of eyes.

Tracking onboarding progress ¶

Your department roster shows an Onboarding column with each member’s completed/total progress bar, and the roster export includes onboarding totals and a status column (Completed / In Progress / Pending). For anyone with outstanding items you can hit the send reminder button, which emails them the event’s onboarding-reminder template (an organizer must have configured that template first).

For HR / event organizers ¶

Final approval ¶

The HR Dashboard (Staff → System → Dashboard) opens with Applications Awaiting HR Review. Approving an application does several things at once:

the applicant joins the department roster (staff or volunteers, per the position type);
an onboarding record is created for every active onboarding flow that targets the department;
the welcome email is sent, if the event’s onboarding_welcome email template has been configured (Staff settings → Emails).

Rejecting records your notes and closes the application.

Building onboarding flows ¶

Staff → System → Onboarding manages onboarding flows — reusable form templates that generate one record per person. A flow has a name, description, an active toggle, and a set of target departments.

Important

A flow with no departments selected becomes an all-staff flow — it applies to every member of every active department in the event.

The flow editor is the same drag-and-drop builder used for registration forms, restricted to onboarding-appropriate field types: markdown text, inputs, selects, checkboxes, a signature pad, basic details, and two components that exist only for onboarding:

Link Button — presents a link (policy document, training video…) and, by default, requires the person to actually open it before the step counts as complete.
Profile Details — has the person complete their membership profile (saved to their account, not to the form).

These two are hidden from the registration form editor’s palette on purpose.

Managing records ¶

Per flow, the manage page offers:

Generate Records — create pending records for everyone currently in the flow’s target departments (people who already have a record for the flow are skipped). Use this after creating a flow mid-season, since HR approval only creates records for people onboarded after the flow existed.
View Responses — browse and search everyone’s submitted answers.
Reset Records — set every record on the flow back to pending and clear all submitted answers. This is irreversible; use it only when re-collecting (for example, a new agreement version).

Inviting people directly ¶

From the HR Dashboard’s department Manage Staff / Manage Volunteers dialogs, Invite by Email sends a personal magic-link invitation to someone who may not have an account yet — email address, optional display name, and an optional personal message. The same dialog lists pending invitations with Resend and Cancel actions.

Invitations expire after 14 days by default; the expiry window is configurable per event.
The invitation email template (subject, body, and placeholder tokens such as the invite URL, department, and inviter name) can be customized in staff settings.
Acceptance is bound to the invited email address and to the event the invite was created on. Every send, resend, cancel, and acceptance is audit-logged.

Transfers between departments ¶

A transfer request moves someone from one department’s roster to another’s (as staff or volunteer). A request records who, from, to, and why, and then needs approval from both sides — the sending department’s leadership and the receiving department’s leadership, in either order. HR can also approve a transfer single-handedly in one step.

On completion the person is moved between rosters (any department title they held in the sending department is removed). Either side’s leadership or HR can reject a request; only the original requester can cancel one, and only while it’s still fully pending.

Using registration as part of onboarding ¶

When the event uses the Register module, staff onboarding can lean on it:

HR can designate a staff registration form (HR Dashboard → Set Staff Registration Form). Staff then see an Event Registration status card on their dashboard linking to that form, and rosters/exports gain a Registered column showing who has a paid registration.
A registration form can be marked “Require Staff Assignment”, which hides it from the public and restricts it to people who belong to at least one department of the event.

If the event does not use Register, provide staff a registration path some other way — see the prerequisites note in the Staff quickstart.

Rules & fine print ¶

One application per person per position; the application cap counts all non-rejected applications (approved ones included).
Applications are only editable while Pending Review.
Review notes are visibility-tiered: HR sees leadership’s and HR’s notes, department leadership sees their own stage’s notes, applicants see neither.
Onboarding records can be re-opened and resubmitted by the staffer after completion (View / Edit), so treat “completed” as current answers on file, not a frozen snapshot.
An invitation link viewed while signed out shows only masked details; the personal message is revealed only to the invited address.
Everything — postings, application decisions, invitations, transfers, roster changes — lands in the staff audit log.

Permissions summary ¶

Action	Who
Browse open positions / apply	Any signed-in user (listings optionally public)
Create and manage a department’s postings	That department’s leadership
Review a department’s applications (first stage)	That department’s leadership
HR queue, final approve/reject	Staff-module `admin`/`superadmin` (HR)
Create/edit onboarding flows, generate & reset records	HR
Send onboarding reminders	Department leadership (or tenant superuser)
Send / resend / cancel invitations	HR
Approve a transfer (one side)	The respective department’s leadership
Complete a transfer in one step	HR
Set the staff registration form	HR