HUB Intranet Partners with Cape Consulting to Launch Smarter Onboarding Experience for SMEs

HUB Intranet has officially partnered with expert HR consultants Cape Consulting to launch a comprehensive digital Onboarding Experience, designed specifically to help mid-market and growing businesses streamline how they welcome and integrate new talent.

As businesses scale, turning a chaotic first week into a structured, welcoming process becomes a critical driver of success. This strategic partnership leverages Cape Consulting’s deep insights into real-world HR pain points to shape HUB’s award-winning digital workplace platform. The result is a dedicated onboarding portal that alleviates administrative friction by creating a tailored onboarding journey for new joiners, alongside a trusted referral pathway for businesses needing an end-to-end HR support system.

At a Glance :

• The Announcement: HUB Intranet and Cape Consulting have partnered to provide a complete onboarding and HR support solution for mid-market businesses.

• The Relationship: Cape Consulting’s expertise informed the pain points solved by HUB’s new digital onboarding ecosystem. In turn, HUB provides clients with a direct referral path to Cape for complex, strategic HR consulting.

• Core Value: Transforms fragmented new-hire processes into a centralized, highly engaging digital journey.

• Key Features: Dedicated but integrated pre-onboarding environments, automated task checklists, personalized welcome dashboards, and a seamless 3-click transition to the main intranet.

The Challenge: Identifying the Friction in the Employee Journey

For mid-market businesses, rapid growth often exposes the cracks in legacy HR processes. Through their extensive consultancy work, Cape Consulting identified the precise pain points where businesses lose new-hire engagement: a maze of welcome emails, fragmented document sharing, disjointed training schedules, and overwhelmed HR teams.

"This new Onboarding Experience, alongside the wider HUB Intranet package, helps SMEs get the essentials of onboarding right while laying the foundations for long-term staff retention," says Simon Fenn, HUB Intranet. "New starters feel informed, welcomed, and productive from day one, with ongoing connection to stay engaged over time."

The Solution: A Tailored Onboarding Ecosystem

To alleviate these specific pain points, HUB tailored its platform to act as a complete, connected onboarding ecosystem. By matching HUB’s flexible intranet architecture with Cape Consulting’s practical HR intelligence, the platform empowers HR and Comms teams to build a fully autonomous hub without requiring IT support.

Key features of the dedicated onboarding portal—highlighted in the newly released HUB Onboarding Guide dashboard—include:

• A Dedicated Environment Within Your Intranet: The onboarding portal is housed within a company’s main intranet but functions as a ring-fenced space solely for new employees. It features custom navigation, content, and a user interface tailored entirely to the onboarding experience. This allows employees to begin their pre-onboarding journey before Day One, while enabling HR to gather essential compliance, payroll, and personal information in advance.

• Zero Content Duplication: Because this environment sits within the broader regular intranet, HR can easily pull in existing vital content—like live company newsfeeds, 'Our Values', and policies—without having to duplicate or manage it twice.

• Effortless Main Intranet Transition: Once a new joiner has completed their onboarding checklist, transitioning them out of the onboarding space and into the main company intranet takes just three clicks.

• Personalized Welcome Hubs: New hires are greeted with a dynamic "Welcome to the Team" banner and personalized messaging, immediately setting the tone for a premium employee experience.

• Interactive Step-by-Step Journeys: The portal breaks down both pre-onboarding and first-week tasks into an intuitive, visual checklist, seamlessly guiding users from initial data collection through to final training modules.

• First-Day Personalization: Understanding that no two employees are the same, the ecosystem includes interactive quick polls allowing new hires to dictate how they want their first day to go.

Employee onboarding checklist

Personalise the onboarding experience by learning about the personal side of your new hires

Optimise how your collect personal details of new employees with digital workflows to collect data

Gather insights into new employees with digital polls to gauge how they work best

Run knowledge tests and quizzes to familiarise new employees with your company

Create dedicated Day One Itineraries so they know what to expect in their onboarding process

An End-to-End HR Experience for Growing Businesses

This partnership extends far beyond the initial onboarding journey. While HUB’s digital environment automates routine administrative tasks and centralizes resources, human resources naturally involves complex, nuanced challenges that software alone cannot solve.

"We know first-hand the challenges that many SMEs face in building and retaining top talent and the importance of new starters having a professional and speedy onboarding experience," explains Franziska Schimm, Director at Cape Consulting. "We’re delighted to partner with HUB Intranet in shaping this initiative. We have made sure the Onboarding Experience is built on robust HR foundations."

Through this collaboration, HUB clients who encounter more complex HR issues—such as employee relations, performance management, or strategic structural changes—have a direct, trusted referral pathway to Cape Consulting. This ensures that businesses are fully supported by expert HR practitioners for an end-to-end employee experience, from the first digital welcome to long-term personnel development.

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About HUB Intranet

Consistently rated as a Top 2 Employee Intranet for SMEs in the UK and a multi-award winner on G2, HUB is a secure, cloud-based digital workplace designed for internal comms and HR teams. HUB empowers organizations to boost engagement, streamline communication, and build a vibrant company culture.

About Cape Consulting

Cape Consulting provides expert HR consulting and outsourced HR solutions, partnering with growing businesses to build strong people foundations. Driven by the philosophy that a business grows when its people grow, Cape Consulting brings seasoned, practical expertise to handle everything from HR essentials and recruitment to complex employee relations and engagement.

https://www.capeconsulting.uk/

For more information on the new digital Onboarding Experience or to book a demo of HUB Intranet, talk to our team.

Contact HUB