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Making onboarding compulsory without locking out your crew
Every labour hire office has the same pile: workers who started months ago and still have not sent in a signed fit-for-work declaration, three people whose induction acknowledgement is sitting in someone's inbox, and a handful of profiles missing a phone number that matters at 4am.
The temptation is to make it compulsory. Nobody gets into the app until their onboarding is finished. It is a satisfying idea and it works, right up until the morning you switch it on and two thirds of your crew cannot see their own roster.
The gate is the easy part
A gate is not hard to build. Mark the steps that matter as mandatory, and block access to everything else until they are done. In Mustr the steps are personal details, a headshot, the induction document to read and acknowledge, a fit-for-work declaration, competencies and availability, each one individually optional or mandatory, plus any steps you add yourself: read and acknowledge a document, upload a file, confirm a statement, or complete a linked form.
The hard part is that a gate is a blunt instrument applied to people who did nothing wrong. Someone who has been on your books for two years, works every swing, and has never missed a shift is now locked out because a form they were never asked for is not on file.
Grace periods make the rule realistic
The first fix is to allow a number of days before a step actually locks someone out, with a banner in the meantime telling them what is outstanding and how long they have.
This matters more for some steps than others. Personal details take two minutes on a phone, so a short window is fair. A signed medical or fit-for-work declaration might need a doctor's appointment, and a GP appointment is not a same-day job in a regional town. A grace period is what lets that step be genuinely required rather than quietly optional, because the alternative is that you make it optional to avoid the fight, and then it never gets done at all.
The cutover date is the one people forget
The second fix is less obvious and matters more. If a step allows fourteen days, fourteen days from when?
From the worker's start date is the intuitive answer, and it is the wrong one. Every existing worker started long ago, so their fourteen days expired years back, and they are all locked out the moment you switch the gate on. That is the failure mode that makes offices turn the whole thing off again by 9:30am.
The answer is a cutover date: set the day you are switching the gate on, and count from there. Existing crew get the full grace period from that day, new starters get it from theirs, and the rule applies to everybody without punishing people for the fact that you introduced it after they joined.
Do not gate the thing you are asking for
One more trap, and it is embarrassing enough to be worth describing. If the gate blocks everything, it can block the pages the wizard itself sends people to. Make fit-for-work required, and the button that takes someone to the fit-for-work page hits the gate and redirects back to the wizard, which offers the button again. A loop with no exit, and every affected worker permanently stuck.
We hit exactly that. Fit-for-work, certificates and availability all sat behind the gate, which meant any organisation that made fit-for-work mandatory would have locked its people out for good. The fix is that those three pages are reachable while gated and nothing else is. If you are evaluating any system with an onboarding gate, that is a good thing to test in the trial: turn every step on, then try to complete one as a worker.
Explain why, not just what
The last piece is not technical. People finish onboarding faster when the reason is honest and specific to them.
The competencies step is the clearest example. Telling a worker to upload their tickets because the office needs them is true and uninspiring. Telling them that sites choose the tickets they need, so the more you have on file the more shifts you see, is also true and is actually an argument in their favour. Same with availability: keeping it current is not admin for the office's benefit, it is how the office knows to offer you the swing in the first place.
Where to start
If you are rolling this out, a reasonable order: make personal details and induction acknowledgement mandatory with a short grace period, leave headshot optional, set fit-for-work mandatory with a realistic window, set your cutover to the day you announce it, and tell the crew a week beforehand what is coming and why. Then leave competencies and availability as strong encouragement rather than a lock, at least until the first two are landing reliably.
The compliance page covers what happens after onboarding, when the tickets you have collected start being checked at the point of booking. Or start a free trial and switch the gate on in a sandbox, where locking everyone out costs nothing.