How to make a welcome video for a new hire, step by step

Most advice about welcome videos is really about onboarding videos: the founder on the mission, a tour of the office, a run through the values. Those are made once and shown to everyone.

This guide is about the other kind. A team welcome video is made for one person, by the people they are about to work with. Each colleague records a short hello, and the clips become one video the new hire watches before their first day.

It takes a few minutes of organising, and the effort is mostly in asking the right people the right questions.

What goes into a team welcome video#

Three things, and none of them needs a script:

• The people they will work with. Each colleague says who they are, what they do and what they can help with.
• A word just for them. Their manager or buddy says something personal: why they are glad this person said yes, what the first week holds.
• Their name. The video is for one person, so it should say so, from the first clip to the last.

What it leaves out matters too. No policies, no org chart, no slides. The new hire will get all of that in their first week. What they cannot get from a handbook is a sense of who these people are.

Step 1: choose who to ask#

Four to six people is about right:

• Their manager. Always.
• The colleagues they will work with every day. The people whose names they need first.
• One or two people from teams they will rely on, such as IT, finance or the team next door.
• At a small company, the founder. A founder can record a general welcome once and reuse it for every new hire, then only the personal clips change.

More than eight and the video gets long. If more people want to take part, that is a good problem: ask them to keep it short.

Step 2: give everyone the same questions#

People freeze when asked to "just say hello". They talk easily when asked a question. These four get good answers:

1. What do you work on, in one sentence?
2. What can they come to you for?
3. What do you wish you had known in your first week?
4. What are you looking forward to working on together? (For the manager.)

Ask for thirty seconds each. That is long enough for a name, a role and one useful thing, and short enough that nobody needs to rehearse. For more prompts and a format for the clips themselves, see employee introduction videos.

Three example messages#

From a teammate: "Hi Maya, I'm Alex, I look after our biggest customers. When you want to know why a customer asks for something, come and find me. Looking forward to meeting you on Monday."

From a buddy: "Hi Maya, I'm Sam, and I'm your buddy for the first few weeks. Nothing is too small to ask, whether it's the wifi password or who to invite to a meeting. See you on the first morning."

From the manager: "Maya, we're really glad you said yes. Your first week is about meeting people, not delivering anything, so take your time. I'm looking forward to working on the new onboarding flow together."

None of these is polished, and that is the point. The new hire is not judging delivery. They are trying to remember who everybody is.

Step 3: collect the clips#

This is the step that usually goes wrong. Clips arrive by email, by chat and through a shared folder, in four different formats, and two people forget.

Whatever you use, the rules are the same:

• Set a deadline, ideally a few days before you want to send the video, so there is time to chase and review.
• Make recording easy. A phone in portrait is fine. Nobody should need an app or an account.
• Say if it is a surprise, so nobody mentions it to the new hire.

Doing it with People Stories#

Create a welcome video, type the new hire's name, set a deadline and add a note for your colleagues (the questions above work well). People Stories gives you one private link. Share it wherever the team talks.

Each colleague opens the link on their phone or laptop, reads your note and records, or uploads a clip they already have. There is no account and nothing to install. Anyone who has recorded an introduction for an earlier welcome is already in your team library, so you can add their clip in a click and only ask the manager or buddy for something new.

Step 4: review, then send#

Watch the whole thing once before anyone else does. Trim the pauses at the start and end of clips, put the manager first or last, and leave out anything that does not work. In People Stories each person gets a name card as they speak, and the video closes with "Looking forward to meeting you" and the new hire's name.

Then send the private watch link. You can also download the video as a file if the new hire should keep a copy.

When to send it#

In the week before they start. It gives them faces to look for on the first morning and time to watch it more than once. If they start remotely, it can be the first thing they open on day one.

For the rest of what a team can do between the signed offer and the first morning, see how to welcome a new starter before day one.

Variations#

• Remote starters. The first time they see the team shouldn't be a grid of cameras on a call. Send the video before day one.
• Graduate and intern intakes. Keep each colleague's introduction and reuse it, so each new starter's video only needs a new clip from their manager.
• Senior hires. A new director has more people to get to know. Ask the heads of the teams they will work with, not just their own reports.
• Moving teams. Someone moving from finance to product is new to their new team, too. The same video works for an internal move.

Why not just record a call?#

Getting everyone into one call is the hard part, and a recording of a call is hard to watch: one tile, then another, with no names. Recording separately lets each person do it when it suits them, and gives the new hire something they can pause, rewatch and put names to.