New-hire Buddy / Mentor Matcher

The problem this kills

Right now, assigning onboarding buddies is a scramble. A new hire starts Monday, and on Friday someone in people-ops pings the same three reliable people in Slack: "Can you buddy up with the new analyst?" The helpful ones keep saying yes until they're quietly mentoring five people at once and burning out. Meanwhile a new hire in another timezone gets paired with someone who speaks a different language and works opposite hours, so the "buddy" relationship never actually happens.

There's no record of who's buddying whom, no balance across the team, and no follow-up. Buddies are assigned in heads and DMs, not anywhere you can see or report on. When a manager asks "does every new hire have a go-to person?" nobody can answer with confidence.

What you'll build

A small, private web app for your onboarding coordinators. You load in the incoming new hires and your pool of willing buddies (with each buddy's team, location, languages, and how many people they can take). The tool reads your matching rules and drafts a balanced set of pairings - respecting location, language, and timezone, spreading the load so no one is overloaded, and avoiding pairings inside a reporting line if your policy forbids it.

Then a human takes over. The coordinator sees every suggested pairing with the reasoning, can swap anyone with a click, and approves. Only then does the tool send the intro emails through Resend and schedule a simple check-in cadence (day 1, week 1, week 4). A buddy can decline before it's finalized, and the pairing routes back for a new suggestion. Everything is logged.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code), which then builds the tool with you step by step - no coding experience required.

• It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before writing any code, the plan has the agent ask about your real onboarding process, the systems and spreadsheets you use, exactly how your data is named, your true buddy capacity rules, and your messiest edge cases. The tool is tailored to how you actually onboard people - not a generic template.
• A clear definition of done so you know exactly what "finished" looks like.
• Step-by-step build instructions, each ending with a ready-to-copy prompt you paste into the agent.
• A matching engine that balances buddy load and respects location, language, timezone, and reporting-line rules.
• A coordinator review screen with swap-and-approve and a buddy decline flow.
• Intro emails and a check-in cadence wired through Resend.
• A "No API yet?" fallback so you can build the whole thing today from Google Sheets / CSV, with a clean CSV export of pairings.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a script that emails people on its own. Governance is built in from the first step:

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so each org only ever sees its own new hires and buddies.
• A complete audit trail - who suggested, swapped, approved, or declined each pairing, and when.
• A human approval gate - the AI only ever drafts pairings. Nothing is emailed or committed until a coordinator approves.
• Duplicate guards - each new hire gets exactly one active buddy, so the same person can't be matched or emailed twice.

Who it's for

People-ops specialists, onboarding coordinators, and team leads who assign onboarding buddies ad-hoc today - and keep overloading the same helpful few. If you've ever lost track of who's mentoring whom, or watched a new hire fall through the cracks because their buddy was stretched thin, this is for you. No developer needed.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the plan interview you.