ADP onboarding walkthroughs for new HR hires

A company promotes an office manager into an HR admin role, gives them ADP Workforce Now access, and expects them to be productive within a week. Six months later the person is still googling how to find certain reports, still calling ADP support for tasks that should take two minutes, and still making errors on things like benefit enrollment corrections because the navigation is genuinely disorganized for someone who didn't grow up in the system.

The complaints in this dataset aren't just from long-time frustrated users — several specifically call out the problem for new users: 'the interface could be more user-friendly for new users' and 'some functions need to be updated and more intuitive.' ADP does have help documentation, but it's designed around features, not around the actual workflows a new HR admin needs to complete in their first 90 days.

This gap exists because ADP's documentation team writes for the system's structure, not for the user's job. No single person at ADP owns the new-admin experience because it crosses product, support, and training teams — each of which has its own incentives. ADP does sell implementation and training services, but those are expensive, one-time engagements that don't help someone hired after go-live.

The HR manager or VP of HR who hired this new admin has a real cost problem: every week the new hire is slow in ADP is a week of delayed processing, errors that create compliance exposure, and senior HR staff time spent answering questions that should be self-serve. That cost is concrete and it recurs every time there's turnover in the HR admin role — which, at small and mid-size companies, happens more often than anyone wants.

The insight that makes this a business rather than a feature: ADP has no incentive to reduce their paid training revenue by making self-guided onboarding so good that companies don't need to buy the training package. A third party has every incentive to do exactly that.

What to build

Build a library of interactive, step-by-step walkthroughs for the 30 most common ADP Workforce Now admin tasks — running payroll, correcting a benefit enrollment, generating a headcount report, terminating an employee — delivered as a browser overlay that activates on the live ADP interface and guides the user click-by-click through the actual screens, with progress tracking per user visible to their manager.

Where to start

Sell first to HR consulting firms and ADP implementation partners who onboard new HR admins at client companies as part of their service — they have a recurring, professional need for this and will pay to stop rebuilding tribal knowledge every time a client's HR person turns over.

The hard part

The walkthroughs are built on top of ADP's live UI, which changes without notice — a single ADP interface update can break a dozen walkthroughs simultaneously, requiring a fast response process that's expensive to maintain without a dedicated team monitoring ADP releases.

How it makes money

Annual license per company, priced around $600–1,200/year based on employee count, with a separate partner tier for HR consultancies that resell access to multiple clients at a margin.