How to build an employee onboarding knowledge base in 5 steps
10th October 2025
posted 10th October 2025
Hiring new employees is exciting, but it can also be a daunting task. Without a structured system, onboarding often means unorganised documents, endless email chains, and repeated questions. That’s where an employee onboarding knowledge base comes in handy.
By having your company handbook, onboarding manuals, and your training resources in one place, you’ll not only save time by reducing confusion, but also give new employees the confidence they need.
In this blog, we’ll explain how to build your own onboarding knowledge base in five simple steps.
Step 1: Define your onboarding goals
What are your goals? Before you start creating your content, clarify what you want your onboarding knowledge base to achieve. Do you want to:
- Reduce HR workload?
- Ensure every new hire gets a consistent experience?
- Speed up the learning time for specific roles?
Having those clear goals will help you decide the structure of your onboarding manual content.
Step 2: Collect existing materials
It’s likely that you already have useful onboarding resources, but they’re just in different places. Spend some time gathering information such as:
- Your employee handbooks
- Your IT setup instructions
- Your employee benefits and HR guides
- Role-specific checklists
- Frequently asked questions from past new hires
Use this information for the foundation of your onboarding documentation system.
Step 3: Structure content by department
An effective onboarding manual knowledge base should be easy to navigate. Make sure that you group your content logically:
- Company-wide: Mission, values, policies
- IT: Login setup, VPN instructions, software installation
- HR: Payroll, benefits, time-off policies
- Departments: Role templates, workflows, reporting formats
This way, employees only see what’s relevant to them.
Step 4: Add step-by-step guides & FAQs
New hires often ask the same questions. Turn these questions into step-by-step guides and FAQ entries in your knowledge base. For example:
- “How do I log into the CRM?”
- “Where do I find payroll information?”
- “What’s our dress code?”
Having these answered in your knowledge base reduces emails to HR and IT, and empowers employees to solve them themselves.
Step 5: Choose the right knowledge base platform
Finally, pick a tool that makes building and maintaining your knowledge base easy. With Webfactory Knowledge Base, you can:
- Set up your website in minutes.
- Organise content into sections and categories
- Keep everything searchable and up to date
- Share securely with employees across departments
Summary
An employee onboarding knowledge base isn’t just a document library. It’s an investment in productivity, culture, and employee success. By following these steps, you’ll build a living onboarding documentation system that scales with your business and makes onboarding stress-free for everyone.
View an onboarding demo
Want to see how an onboarding knowledge base would look and function? Take a look at our onboarding demo website for Forge Marketing.
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