04
Nexa Resources
Employee onboarding experience
A centralized onboarding experience designed to help Nexa Resources empower new hires from day one, improve visibility for managers, and reduce the operational friction between offer, equipment, training, and integration.
Context and challenge
Nexa's onboarding process was spread across disconnected platforms and manual handoffs. New employees had to navigate unclear steps, managers lacked real-time visibility, and essential equipment and training activities could become bottlenecks.
The challenge was to transform a fragmented administrative process into a supportive, measurable journey that improved new-hire engagement, productivity, and safety. The strategic context included a 37% first-year accident rate, making effective onboarding more than an HR convenience: it was an operational and safety priority.
Approach and process
The project used a co-creation model with the HR team and an agile delivery approach. Discovery combined workshops, interviews, journey mapping, persona development, and synthesis of operational and safety pain points.
The journey was mapped across before, during, and after onboarding: selection and proposal, documentation, equipment, training, manager follow-up, integration with the team, and long-term check-ins. This exposed the moments where expectations and reality diverged, as well as the opportunities to make progress visible and actionable.
Key design decisions
The experience was designed as an integrated system rather than a single employee-facing screen. Candidates, new employees, managers, HR, and training stakeholders each received the right level of visibility and action for their role.
A central dashboard gave managers a live view of open opportunities, employees in onboarding, average time to hire, diversity indicators, and turnover. A candidate profile and progress timeline connected documents, skills, interviews, and hiring stages. The design system established a consistent foundation across the platform, from typography and color to components, icons, tags, progress bars, and forms.
Final experience and visuals
The visual direction brings Nexa's industrial context into a more human and approachable digital environment. Orange becomes a clear action signal, while soft surfaces, rounded panels, progress indicators, and illustrations help reduce the intimidation of a complex operational process.
The final ecosystem connects onboarding, dashboard reporting, candidate profiles, sign-up, equipment readiness, interviews, and progress tracking in one visual language.
Outcomes and learnings
hours of administrative work saved per manager, per new hire
reduction in equipment wait time
in projected productivity gains for the first year
The documented projections estimated 4 hours of administrative work saved per manager, per new hire, a 65% reduction in equipment wait time, and US$1M in projected productivity gains in the first year. The expected impact came from faster time-to-productivity, automated requests, and increased visibility across the onboarding process.
The project reframed onboarding as a measurable product experience: safer, more transparent, and more supportive for the people entering the organization, while giving managers and HR a clearer operational system to run.