How to record an onboarding video for new employees

A new employee's first day is usually a mix of friendly welcome and scattered information: the PDF manual nobody finishes reading, the twenty-minute talk repeated for every person who joins, and the office tour where half an hour later you can't remember half the names. An onboarding video doesn't replace people, but it organizes the part you can record once and reuse with every new hire.

At A0Studios we get more and more requests for this kind of piece: companies that want a consistent welcome that doesn't depend on the HR person having a free calendar that week. A good onboarding video saves hours of repeated explanation and keeps the first impression from depending on who happens to be available in the office that day.

What an onboarding video is and why it matters

An onboarding video is made for someone who has already signed the contract, not to attract new talent. That is the difference from an employer branding video: that one aims to make an outsider want to join, while this one helps someone who has already joined quickly understand how the company works, who is who and what is expected of their first week.

The advantage over a live talk is that you record it once and it serves every future hire, with no change in the message depending on who delivers it that day. And compared with a written manual, a video conveys tone, culture and real faces in a way a PDF can't, however well laid out.

How to do it well

What to include and what to leave for the manual

The video should carry what a document doesn't convey well: who leads each team, how people talk inside the company, what is truly valued day to day. Purely operational matters (how to request vacation, which tool to use to clock in, where the first-aid kit is) work better in a document you can search and consult, not in a video you have to rewind.

Who appears on camera

A single executive talking for eight minutes straight drags and is quickly forgotten. It works better to share the screen time: a short intervention from the founder or CEO, a brief piece from each team lead presenting what their area does, and someone from HR closing with the practical points. Three or four different faces, each with fifteen or thirty seconds, are remembered better than one person with a long monologue.

Format and length

What works best is a modular video split into short chapters, two or three minutes per block, instead of a single twenty-minute piece nobody finishes. That way, if a team lead changes, you re-record only that block without touching the rest of the video.

Common mistakes

The same mistakes appear again and again in onboarding videos recorded without a plan:

• Recording a single twenty-minute video that nobody finishes.
• Letting only one executive speak, with no examples or faces from the real teams.
• Not updating it when the team or the office changes, so it is out of date within months.
• Recording it on a phone in a meeting room with echo and bad light.
• Mixing onboarding content with employer branding content meant for outsiders.
• Putting all the operational content inside the video instead of leaving it in a searchable document.

Frequently asked questions

If you are thinking of setting up a video onboarding process for your company, at A0Studios we plan it in modular blocks from the first day of recording, so updating it later doesn't mean redoing anything. Write to us via /#contacto and we'll sort it out.