# New hire ramp board built from your Guru knowledge base

> Managers keep one board open through a new hire's first month, with a three week reading path built from your own Guru cards and ticked off as it lands.

- Workflow type: app
- Services: Guru, BambooHR, Slack Bot
- Categories: HR & People, Operations
- Published: 2026-08-24

## What it does

- Lists everyone hired in the last 90 days with their role, department and start date, so managers stop keeping their own new starter spreadsheet
- Opens each person into a three week reading path drawn from the knowledge base you already have, with a completion checkbox on every item that the app records itself
- Builds that path on request: an assistant reads the person's role and department, picks the material that genuinely fits, orders it across weeks one to three, and writes a short reason for each item the manager can edit before saving
- Flags topics a role clearly needs but nothing covers, so the manager can raise the gap with whoever owns the closest existing article
- Shows completion by starting cohort and by department, so People Ops can see which teams really onboard people and which quietly skip it

## What you'll need

- A Guru account with the collections your teams already keep
- A BambooHR login that can read the employee directory, or another supported HR system you can pull a staff list from
- A Slack workspace where a bot can send direct messages
- No prep work in Guru beyond what is already written, since the assistant searches whatever it can see

## Prompt

Build me a ramp desk that a hiring manager and People Ops keep open through a new hire's first month, instead of chasing a checklist spreadsheet. It runs on Guru for the reading material, BambooHR for who the new hires are, and Slack Bot for nudges. One constraint to get right up front: Guru exposes no analytics or read tracking operations here, so it cannot tell you who read which card. Every completion checkbox in this app is stored by the app itself, and that stored record is the only source of truth for progress. Do not build anything that implies Guru is reporting reading activity.

The main board lists everyone hired in the last 90 days. Get the cohort from BambooHR with Get Employee Directory and filter on hire date, then call Get Employee for each person to fill in job title, department and start date. One row per person showing name, role, department, start date, which week of their ramp they are in, a completion bar across their reading path, and days since they last completed a card. Let the manager sort by least progress, filter by department, and group by starting cohort, where a cohort is everyone who started in the same month. Someone with no path built yet should read clearly as such rather than showing as zero percent complete. BambooHR is what this is written against; if the team runs a different HR system, the same board works off any supported HRIS with an employee directory read.

Opening a person shows their reading path, grouped into week one, week two and week three. Each row shows the card title, the collection and folder it came from, and a short line explaining why this person is reading it. Each row carries a completion checkbox that the app stores against that person and that card, with a timestamp. Expanding a row pulls the card body with Get Card so the manager or the new hire can see what is actually in it without leaving the app. The manager can also add a card by hand using Search Cards, move cards between weeks, and remove one that does not apply.

A "Build this hire's path" button on the person view runs a background agent. Give it the person's job title, department and start date. It should understand the shape of the knowledge base first, using List Collections and List Folders, then run several Search Cards queries derived from the role and the department rather than one generic query, and read the promising results with Get Card so it is judging real content instead of titles. Out of what it finds it keeps the cards that genuinely match the role, discards the near misses, and sequences them: week one is what they need to be useful at all, meaning how the company works, who the team is, and the tools they touch daily; week two is the depth of their actual craft; week three is the edges, meaning adjacent teams, escalation paths, and the things that bite people in month two. For every card it writes one or two sentences saying why this person is reading this, in plain language and specific to their role.

The agent's output lands in the app as a draft path the manager reviews before it becomes real. Show the proposed weeks with every card and its rationale line, let the manager edit any rationale line inline, move cards between weeks, drop cards, and add ones the agent missed, then save. Nothing counts toward completion and nothing is treated as assigned until the manager saves. Re-running the agent later proposes a revision alongside the saved path rather than silently overwriting it.

While it works, the agent also notes topics the role clearly needs where no card covers it. Each of those becomes a documentation gap, shown on that person's page and collected on a gaps list across the whole app, with the topic, which role and department surfaced it, and the closest existing cards it did find. From a gap the manager can post a comment with Create Card Comment on the closest card, asking whoever owns it to cover the missing topic. Guru comment operations need the card's long id rather than its short slug, so carry the long id through. Keep a count of how many times each gap has been raised, because the same missing topic surfacing across three new hires is exactly the signal People Ops needs.

From either the board or the person view, the manager can nudge someone who has stalled. Resolve their Slack account from their BambooHR work email with Look Up User by Email, then send a direct message with Send a Message. The message should name the specific cards still outstanding and which week they belong to rather than saying something generic. Record when each person was last nudged and surface it on the row so nobody gets pinged twice in the same day.

People Ops needs a rollup view on top of the board: completion percentage per cohort and per department, average days to finish week one, and how many people have no path built at all. The purpose of this view is to show which teams actually onboard people and which quietly skip it, so make the weak departments obvious rather than burying them in an even grid. Clicking a department drills into its people.

The app stores the reading paths, meaning the cards, their week assignment, their order and their rationale lines, plus the completion checkboxes with timestamps, the documentation gaps and how often each has been raised, and the nudge history. Everything read from Guru is read only, apart from the gap comments the manager chooses to post.

## How to customize

- Change the 90 day window that decides who still counts as a new hire
- Change the shape of the path, for example four weeks instead of three, or a shorter one for internal transfers
- Decide how many days without progress counts as stalled, and what the nudge message says

## FAQ

### Does Guru tell you who has read which card?

No, and the app does not pretend otherwise. Guru does not report per person reading, so completion is a checkbox the app records itself. That is arguably the better signal anyway, since opening a page is not the same as working through it.

### Can two people in the same role get different reading paths?

Yes. The path is built per person and the manager edits it before saving, so a senior joiner and a graduate on the same team can end up with very different first months.

### Do we have to reorganize our knowledge base first?

No. It works with the collections and folders you already have, and the assistant searches across whatever it can see rather than needing a special onboarding section.

### What happens when a new hire needs something nobody has written down?

It gets flagged as a documentation gap instead of being quietly dropped. You can raise it as a comment on the closest existing article, and the app counts how many new hires have hit the same gap.

### Is this the same as sending someone a reading list on their first day?

No. A day one message is a single send. This is the surface a manager keeps open for the whole first month, with progress, nudges and cohort reporting behind it.

Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/new-hire-ramp-board-built-from-your-guru-knowledge-base