Paperlatch
A Confluence onboarding template, and how to know new hires actually read the policies
Guide · Checked against Atlassian's documentation on 21 October 2026
Many teams already run onboarding from Confluence: one space or page tree with everything a new person needs in their first weeks. The structure below works for most teams. The part most of them miss is the last one: knowing that each new hire actually read the policies they were pointed to.
A page structure that works
Keep onboarding in one place, and keep each page short enough to read in one sitting.
| Page | What goes on it |
|---|---|
| Start here | One page with the first-week plan and links to everything below |
| Accounts and access | What they will get access to, and who to ask |
| How we work | Team rituals, where decisions are written down, how to ask for help |
| Policies to read | The handful of policies every employee must read, one per page |
| Role pages | What is specific to engineering, sales, support and so on |
| Glossary | The words and acronyms only your company uses |
Confluence has page templates and a Copy option for page trees, so you can keep one master version and copy it for each team.
The checklist
A checklist you can paste into the "Start here" page:
- Day 1: accounts working, laptop set up, first meeting with the manager
- Week 1: read the required policies (linked below), meet the team, first small task
- Week 2: role-specific training, shadow a colleague
- Month 1: a check-in with the manager on what is still unclear
Use Confluence's task list (type `[]` in the editor) so each item can be ticked and assigned.
The part most onboarding misses: confirming the policies
"Read the information security policy" is usually a line in the checklist. A ticked box tells you the new hire says they are done. It does not tell you:
- which version of the policy they read,
- when, in a form an auditor will accept,
- who has not done it yet, across every new hire this quarter.
If your company is audited (ISO 27001, SOC 2, or a customer's security questionnaire), that third question comes up: show that everyone who joined since the last audit acknowledged the policies. A task list cannot answer it. See policy attestation for ISO 27001 and SOC 2 for what auditors typically ask for.
How to record it
Three ways, from free to automatic:
- A table on each policy page with name and date. Free, but anyone can edit it, and nothing tells you who is missing.
- A form linked from the checklist. Reliable timestamps, but it does not know which version of the policy the person read.
- A confirmation button on the policy page. Confluence has no built-in one, so this means a Marketplace app.
We make one: Confirm & Chase. Put it on each policy page and pick the group that must confirm. For onboarding, that is usually a group your admins already add new hires to. One dashboard then shows, for every policy, who has confirmed and who is outstanding. When a policy changes, a new round starts and earlier confirmations stay on record. It is free for up to 10 users.
Paperlatch makes Confirm & Chase.