Remote employee onboarding

The job

A company hires someone in another city, or another country, and the first day is a video call. Payroll, equipment and access to company systems depend on the person being who the contract says. An email with a scan of a passport does not answer the question, and a trip to an office is exactly what remote hiring is meant to avoid.

This page follows the hire from the accepted offer to the day the HR system gets its answer. It is about identity checks of employees, not of gig workers who join in large cohorts, which is described on the gig worker onboarding page.

The flow

1. The invitation. After the offer is accepted, HR generates a single-use link in the dashboard for the onboarding scenario and sends it through the company's own channel. A link has an expiry, from 15 minutes to 30 days, so choose one that reaches past the start date but not far beyond it. With a single link you can also set a client key that ties the session to the hire in your HR system. Use an opaque identifier of your own, not the name. See QR hand-off and one-time links.
2. The device. The hire opens the link on a phone. A hire who starts on a computer scans a QR code and finishes on the phone. See desktop to phone verification.
3. The details. If you want a questionnaire, it is a first stage in a scenario of its own: the hire enters name, birth date, contacts and the custom fields your company needs, before the identity check starts. The identity check is a second, separate KYC scenario, and the completed questionnaire is linked to it. See questionnaire and two-stage verification.
4. The document. The hire photographs a passport, national ID card, driver's licence, residence permit or visa. The document is read, and checked for fraud.
5. The extra document. If your process needs one, a utility bill, a bank statement or a lease can be added as an extra document in the same session. See proof of address.
6. The face. The hire takes a selfie, which is matched to the document portrait, and moves the face closer through two ovals. See face verification and liveness.
7. The review. HR sees the session in the dashboard. Cases the rules do not settle go to a person with the right role, who changes the status by hand after a confirmation.
8. The result. Your HR or payroll system reads the session status, or receives a webhook when the session is complete.

Hires use whatever phone they own, so test the link on an ordinary phone before the first batch. If an invitation reaches a hire in an embedded browser of a messenger and the camera does not start, ask the hire to open the link in the system browser. See mobile apps and WebView.

One check, several hires

For a start date that brings in a whole class of hires, the dashboard generates from 1 to 1,000 links at once. Each link opens one verification for one person. See bulk link invitations.

What the result is, and is not

The platform checks the person: the document, the face and the liveness. It does not know your employment terms, the role or the country of the job. A session that succeeds means that every step of the scenario passed, and the session does not pass without the face matching of the selfie and the document portrait. What your company does with that is yours: release the laptop, give access, start payroll, or ask for more.

Read the status on your server and make the decision there. Keep the status the platform gave apart from your own decision, because a reviewer can change a status later.

A regulatory frame: the right to work in the United Kingdom

Employment law differs by country, so this block shows one example from a primary text: the guidance that GOV.UK gives to employers on checking a job applicant's right to work. This is not legal advice.

• The guidance says that an employer must check that a job applicant is allowed to work in the UK before employing them.
• It lists routes: an online check with the applicant's share code, a check of the applicant's original documents, or an identity service provider that offers Identity Document Validation Technology.
• For the original documents route, it says to check that the documents are valid with the applicant present.
• It asks the employer to check that the documents are genuine, original and unchanged and belong to the person who has given them, that the photos are the same across all documents and look like the applicant, and that dates of birth are the same across all documents.
• It tells the employer to make and keep copies of the documents and to record the date of the check, to keep the copies during the applicant's employment and for 2 years after the person stops working for the employer, and to follow data protection law.

Two things follow for the design of a remote flow. First, an identity check is one part of the duty, and which route applies is a question for the employer. The platform makes no statement about the routes. Second, the duty to keep copies and the wish to keep personal data no longer than needed pull in different directions. Retention of session data is a setting of each scenario, and erasure on request is available by API, so decide the retention period with your counsel and set it on purpose. See data controls.

Scenario setup

In the scenario editor build the identity check as a KYC scenario: the document step with the countries and documents you hire from, the selfie and liveness steps, and the extra document if your process asks for it. If you want a questionnaire, build it as a separate scenario. The questionnaire step can be added only to an empty scenario and becomes its only step, so a questionnaire and the identity steps cannot share one scenario. To link the two, generate the one-time link for the KYC scenario with a quantity of one and select the completed questionnaire record, so that the document data is matched against it, or pass the questionnaire identifier to the widget for the second stage. Set the retention of session data for the scenario. Brand the widget with your own colours and logo so that the hire sees the company that sent the invitation. See branded verification widget.

What your system receives

A session status and a list of results for each step. A callback can leave out the documented identity fields (names, document data and images) and keep the session identifier, so that your HR system fetches the result by that identifier. The block that reports the outcome of a required reference comparison stays in the body. See session statuses and webhooks.

Source

GOV.UK, Checking a job applicant's right to work, guidance page, fetched 27 October 2026.

Next

See a verification on sample data in the interactive tour, or talk to us about your onboarding flow.