What these skills are
A whole onboarding, as installable Claude skills. Onboarding is the stretch where a company's intentions meet its calendar, and it mostly fails as unsent email. The classic failure has no villain in it: the hiring manager expects HR, HR expects the recruiter, and the joiner hears silence between the day they said yes and the morning they walk in.
One rule runs through all of it: Claude prepares and keeps track, humans welcome. No skill in this set replaces the manager's first conversation, the team's hello, or the lunch on day one. They build the plan, write the requests, keep the checklist honest, and remember what is due. The welcome itself stays with people: the congratulations notes are prompted rather than ghost-written, and the joiner approves their own introduction before anyone else reads it.
Mechanically, each skill is one folder with a SKILL.md file. Install only the ones for your role: 7 for whoever runs onboarding, 4 for the hiring manager, 1 for the person joining. Everyone starts with onboarding-setup, which interviews you once and fills in company-onboarding-context.md, the file every other skill reads, so no skill ever asks you to re-explain your company. Files travel between people the way trust does: by a human, on purpose.
Download all 12 skills. One zip, one folder per skill, plus the company context template and a README. Free, no signup. The same twelve skills are open on GitHub: polar-bear-org/claude-skills.
The 12 skills you get
The set is grouped by who installs it. Everyone starts with the same skill:
0. Onboarding Setup (everyone)
Use when: You've installed the skills and nothing is configured yet
Output: Your Onboarding HQ project created, company-onboarding-context.md filled in from one fifteen-minute interview, and a test run of your first skill
If you run onboarding (founder, HR lead, or HRBP)
1. Preboarding Planner
Use when: Someone just accepted your offer and day one has to go right
Output: The plan from yes to day one: the handoff written down so nobody assumes someone else is doing it, the internal track with an owner and a date per item, the keep-warm touchpoints, and the open risks
2. Onboarding Comms Drafter
Use when: IT, finance and the workspace need to hear about the joiner, and nothing is written
Output: One short email per owner, under 100 words, one deadline in the first line and a checklist they can tick, plus the keep-warm notes to the joiner and the nudge for when nobody confirms
3. Welcome Brief Writer
Use when: The start is approaching and the joiner hasn't heard what it's actually like to work here
Output: The congratulations choreography for right after the yes, and the one-page cultural brief for three days before: hours, dress code, lunch, rituals and first-day logistics, in the company's real voice
4. Welcome Pack Designer
Use when: You want joiners to receive something on day one that isn't a mug they'll abandon
Output: The pack as a company standard: every item marked necessity or emotional with why it earned its place, the per-role variants, the sourcing and shipping realities, and budget math as ranges rather than invented prices
5. Onboarding Checklist Builder
Use when: A pre-boarding plan exists and needs to become something people can tick
Output: The per-joiner checklist by phase, every line a task with one named owner and one date, plus a self-contained HTML dashboard with tick boxes, progress per phase, and flags for anything past its deadline
6. Joiner Companion Builder
Use when: New joiners keep asking the same thirty questions and they all land on you
Output: The companion's instruction block, a coverage report against the questions joiners actually ask — its "not answered" list is your handbook's holes — and the deployment kit for a shared project or individual accounts
If you're the hiring manager
7. Team Deck Builder
Use when: Someone starts next week and nothing explains where they landed
Output: A real pptx in four layers — company, function, team, person — 12 to 18 slides: the first run builds your master, every run after derives the per-joiner edition in minutes
8. Team Intro Writer
Use when: The team needs to hear who's joining before the person walks in
Output: One message under 150 words in your voice, with the joiner's own photo, their own background lines and only the personal details they offered, adapted per channel and never sent without their approval
9. First Goals Writer
Use when: A joiner has started and nobody has written down what success looks like
Output: Three to five 90-day goals on a 30/60/90 rhythm, each traced to a business goal and each naming the support it assumes, ending in the evaluation paragraph, plus the agenda for the one-hour ways-of-working session
10. Week One Designer
Use when: The start date is close and the joiner's calendar is still empty
Output: Day one hour by hour, the meeting map with who, when and why this person at two to three a day, the breathing room blocked on purpose, and the booking list handed to whoever owns calendars
If you're the one joining
11. My First 90
Use when: You start Monday, and it's fifty names, a dozen systems and a hose
Output: Your own pinned chat as the dashboard: the 90-day map, the daily two-minute brief, your wins logged with their dates, and your half of the 30, 60 and 90-day conversations built from the chat's own history
How the journey flows
The skills run in the order a real arrival does. The plan comes first (1), and everything else hangs off it: the emails that make it happen (2), the brief and the pack that reach the joiner before they start (3, 4), and the checklist that makes the whole thing visible (5). The manager works in parallel on what day one and week one will feel like (7, 8, 10), the first goals land inside two weeks (9), and the joiner runs their own companion from day one (11). The two standing builds, the context file (0) and the policy companion (6), are set up once and read by everything after.
It hands off cleanly at day 90. The first goals end in an evaluation paragraph, and where a company has no review rhythm to point at yet, the pack says so plainly and sends you to the Review Cycle Pack, where these goals become the first review's evidence.
Setup guide
- Download the pack. One zip, one folder per skill, plus the README and the company context template. Keep the whole set or pull the folders for your role.
- Install your skills. In Claude Code, add the marketplace and install onboarding-pack: all twelve load at once. In Claude, turn on code execution in Settings, Capabilities, then go to Customize, Skills and upload one zip per skill from the pack's install folder. Prefer working from files? Add the SKILL.md files to your Project knowledge instead; it works, just less cleanly.
- Say "run onboarding-setup". It asks who you are, walks you through creating your Onboarding HQ project, interviews you once to fill in company-onboarding-context.md, and ends with a test run. Fifteen minutes, and you never repeat it for a new joiner.
- Open a chat the next time someone says yes. One pinned chat per joiner ("Onboarding · Maria, starts Oct 1"), and run preboarding-planner in it. Everything else flows from the plan it produces.
Where to start
| Your situation | Skill to run |
|---|---|
| Someone just accepted the offer | Preboarding Planner |
| Ten days out and IT still hasn't been told | Onboarding Comms Drafter |
| She starts Monday and has heard nothing since signing | Welcome Brief Writer |
| A plan exists and nobody can see where it stands | Onboarding Checklist Builder |
| You're the manager, and there is no deck | Team Deck Builder |
| Week two, and no goals are written down | First Goals Writer |
| A start date next week and an empty calendar | Week One Designer |
| You're the one starting on Monday | My First 90 |
The quality bar
Every skill in the pack holds the same standard, the one we hold in client work:
- Claude prepares and keeps track, humans welcome: no skill replaces the manager's first conversation, the team's hello, or the lunch on day one
- The congratulations notes are prompted, never ghost-written: five real sentences from five real people beat five polished paragraphs from one skill
- The joiner approves their own introduction before it is sent: they are being introduced, not announced
- Every task carries one named owner and one date, and a task without an owner is written as a flagged gap rather than a wish
- Flags are about the process, never the person: "IT not confirmed" is a flag; the joiner's enthusiasm is not a field anywhere
- The brief describes the culture you have, not the culture you want, because the joiner re-reads it with new eyes after their first week
- Nothing invented: systems come from the systems list, names from the roles section, prices from real research, and a gap gets surfaced instead of filled in
- Sensitive data stays out of drafts and dashboards, and the serious matters — contracts, visas, conduct, health — get an owner and a deadline, not a paragraph
Who made this
Polar Bear is a people ops consultancy for human-size teams (20 to 200 people). Built by ex-McKinsey founders with a dream to make AI work for People, not instead of them. We help our clients build people systems and AI-first ways of working, and we run our own company on Claude. This pack is the free, self-serve version of how we work. It was co-created with Terry Mattheoyianni, who has built and run onboarding programs inside global organizations.
The pack carries one joiner at a time, by hand, and that is enough at a few hires a year. When the requests need scheduling the moment a start date locks, the checklist needs feeding from your systems, and the companion needs to be always on, that stops being a skill and becomes a build. That's what we do with clients.
Want to know how AI can help you accelerate onboarding? Find 30 min with Pauline · Pauline on LinkedIn
Want to build a comprehensive HR strategy? Reach out to Terry