Ask for an onboarding checklist, not a welcome email

The instinctive ask - "write a welcome email for a new starter" - gets you something warm and readable that does nothing to make sure the new starter's laptop, accounts, and first-day meeting actually exist by the time they walk in. It reads like the onboarding process is sorted because there's a nice document to show for it, which is exactly the trap: a good email and a good onboarding process are not the same deliverable.

Ask for the checklist before you ask for the email. Give the model the role, the systems the person needs access to, and who owns each item (IT, facilities, the line manager, HR), and ask for a task list with an owner and a "by when" against every line - kit ordered a week before start date, accounts created the day before, building access and a desk sorted, a first-week meeting schedule drafted. Only once that exists does the welcome email become worth writing, because now it's describing a day that's actually been prepared for rather than standing in for the preparation.

The other benefit: a checklist with named owners is the thing that actually catches the gap - nobody ordered a laptop, or IT doesn't know the start date - while there's still time to fix it. A welcome email never surfaces that, because it was never asked to.