New-Hire Announcement & Buddy Assignment
Build an internal tool that drafts a warm new-hire announcement from a short intake and suggests an onboarding buddy from your eligible pool, then waits for HR to approve before anything is sent or assigned.
New hire is added, the tool drafts an announcement and suggests a buddy with a clear reason, HR approves or edits, then the announcement goes out, the buddy is notified, and the pairing is recorded and exportable as CSV.
Before you start
- A free Vercel account
- A free Supabase project
- A free Resend account (or skip email at first and review drafts on screen)
- A list of employees who can be onboarding buddies (a spreadsheet is fine)
The problem this kills
A new person starts Monday. Someone meant to send a welcome note and assign a buddy, but it slipped. The announcement that does go out is rushed and a little generic, and the "buddy" is whoever was standing nearby — usually the same overloaded person who always gets stuck with it. Sometimes the new hire is accidentally paired with their own manager, which defeats the point.
The result is that first impressions feel uneven. Some new hires get a warm, personal welcome and a great buddy; others get a one-line Slack message and nobody to show them where the coffee is.
This tool makes the good version the default, every time — without taking the decision out of HR's hands.
What you'll build
A small, private web app for your people-ops team:
- A simple intake form for a new hire (name, role, team, start date, a fun fact, an optional photo).
- An AI-drafted announcement built from that intake and your own template, so the voice matches your company.
- A suggested onboarding buddy, picked from your eligible-employee pool by matching team, sensible tenure, and current buddy load — with a one-line reason you can see ("Same team, here 14 months, currently mentoring 0 people").
- A review screen where HR reads the draft and the suggestion, edits anything, and clicks Approve.
- On approval: the announcement is sent, the buddy is notified, and the pairing is recorded — then it shows up in a CSV export of all pairings.
It balances buddy load so one helpful person isn't drowning, never pairs a new hire with their own manager, and respects anyone who has opted out of being a buddy.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code). It walks the agent through building the whole tool step by step, with a ready-to-copy prompt at the end of each step.
Most importantly, the plan opens by interviewing you about your business — how you announce hires today, what your buddy pool looks like, how you name teams and roles, your typical and busy-season hiring volume, and your real rules (tenure minimums, max buddies per person, opt-outs, the manager rule). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before building anything. You get a tool shaped to how you actually onboard, not a generic template.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
Onboarding touches real people and real records, so the plan bakes in the safeguards from the start:
- Login so only your HR team can open the tool.
- Row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's data.
- A human approval gate: the AI only drafts the announcement and suggests the buddy. Nothing is sent and no pairing is committed until a person reviews and clicks Approve.
- A complete audit trail — who submitted, who approved or edited, who got assigned, and exactly when.
- Duplicate guards so the same new hire can't be processed twice and nobody ends up with two active pairings.
Who it's for
People-ops coordinators and team leads who currently wing the announcement and forget to assign a buddy — and want every new hire to feel genuinely welcomed without adding a manual checklist to their week.
You've got this. Open the plan, paste the first prompt, and let the agent interview you.