The first week of a new job involves a lot of this: someone senior sits next to the new starter, opens a tool, and walks through it. Click here, then here, then this button does that, don’t worry about that section yet. An hour later the new person has a rough mental map and a long list of follow-up questions.
It works. But it does not scale. The senior person loses an hour. The new starter retains maybe half of it. Two weeks later they have questions again, and the person who trained them has moved on to other things.
There is a better way to handle software onboarding, and it does not require you to be in the room.
Why Live Training Has a Ceiling
Live training is good for some things: culture, relationships, questions that require back-and-forth, complex judgment calls. It is not well suited to software walkthroughs, for a few reasons.
It does not scale. Every new hire requires the same session with the same person. As the team grows, the time cost grows with it.
The timing is usually wrong. You train someone on a tool during their first week, before they have any real context for why the process works the way it does. By the time they actually use it, some of what they were shown has faded.
There is no way to rewind. When someone gets confused on step four, they cannot go back and rewatch step three. They either ask again or muddle through.
Good async training solves all three of these. The session happens once. New starters access it when they actually need it. They can pause, rewind, and watch again without anyone’s time being involved.
What Async Software Training Looks Like
Async software training is not a thirty-page manual. It is a short library of focused guides, one per task or workflow, each covering exactly one thing clearly.
The best format depends on the complexity of the tool and the process:
Short narrated video guides work well for anything that involves clicking through a series of steps. Watching someone navigate the tool in real time, with narration explaining what each click does, is easier to follow than reading about it. The guide can be paused, rewound, and watched multiple times without anyone’s involvement.
Annotated screenshot guides work for simpler processes where the user mainly needs to know what to click and where. Faster to create than video, easier to skim, but harder to follow for anything with more than eight or ten steps.
Written SOPs work best when the process involves judgment as well as clicks. What to do when X happens, who to escalate to, why the process is structured a certain way. Text is better than video for reference material that people scan rather than follow linearly.
Most good onboarding setups use a combination: video or screenshot guides for tool walkthroughs, written documentation for policy and context.
How to Build a Training Library Without Spending Weeks on It
The reason most teams do not have proper async training is that building it sounds like a big project. It does not have to be.
The fastest approach is to create guides as you go rather than trying to document everything at once. The next time you would normally sit down with a new starter to walk through a tool, capture the walkthrough instead. Install a browser extension like Scribe, Tango, or Guideless, click to start capturing, and walk through the process as you normally would. The tool records your actions and generates a guide from them.
That one session produces a reusable guide instead of a one-time explanation. The next new starter gets the same quality of walkthrough without requiring anyone’s time.
Done consistently over a few months, this approach builds a useful library without any dedicated documentation effort.
Tools That Make This Practical
Scribe is the most widely used tool for this kind of documentation. It records your clicks as you go and generates a step-by-step guide with annotated screenshots. Clear, fast to produce, easy to share via link. Free plan available, paid from around $23/month per user.
Tango works similarly and adds in-app guidance: you can embed tooltips directly inside tools so employees get help in context rather than having to switch to a separate guide. Also has a free tier.
Loom is useful for walkthroughs where you want to add personal context or explain reasoning alongside the steps. You record your screen with narration, share a link, and the new employee watches it when convenient. Less structured than Scribe or Tango but faster to produce for informal explanations. Free for up to 25 videos, paid from $15/month.
Guideless captures your workflow via a browser extension and generates a narrated video guide using AI. The AI writes the script from your recorded steps, adds a voiceover, and assembles the video. The result is more polished than a raw Loom recording without requiring the editing work. Useful when you want video-format guides for a library that will be shared with multiple new starters over time. Free for up to three guides, $29/user per month for the paid plan. guideless.ai.
Structuring the Training So It Actually Gets Used
A library of guides is only useful if new starters know what to look at and in what order. A few things that help:
Separate need-to-know from nice-to-know. Most software tools have ten times more features than a new employee needs in their first month. Identify the five to eight workflows they will actually use and document those first. Everything else can come later.
Sequence the guides. A new starter should not have to decide which guide to watch first. Give them an ordered list: start here, then this, then this. A simple checklist in Notion or a shared doc is enough.
Set expectations about when to watch. Guides are most useful right before someone needs to use the tool for the first time, not a week before. If possible, assign guides as tasks that get completed immediately before the relevant work starts.
Keep each guide to one task. A twelve-minute guide that covers four different workflows is harder to reference than four three-minute guides. When someone has a question about one specific step, they want to find and rewatch that one thing, not scrub through a longer video.
Handling the Questions That Still Come Up
Even with good async training, new starters will have questions. The goal is not to eliminate questions entirely, it is to eliminate repeat questions about documented processes.
One way to reduce friction: create a short written FAQ alongside your guides. What do I do if the button does not appear? What if I get an error at step six? These edge cases come up repeatedly, and writing them down once is faster than answering them repeatedly.
The other thing worth doing is asking new starters to note where they got confused. If three people in a row get stuck at the same step, the guide needs to be clearer. Treating early confusion as feedback rather than a failure of the new employee usually produces better documentation over time.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A realistic version of async software onboarding for a small team might look like this:
A new starter joins. They are given a checklist of five guides to complete in their first week, each covering one tool or workflow. Each guide is between two and five minutes, accessible via a link. They watch each one when they are about to use that tool for the first time.
If they have questions, there is a short written FAQ for each guide and a designated person to ask. But most questions are answered by the guide itself, because it shows exactly what to do and what the screen should look like at each step.
The person who created the guides spent about the same amount of time creating them as they would have spent doing one-to-one live walkthroughs with two new starters. Every new starter after that gets the same quality of training for free.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to build a basic training library from scratch?
For most small teams, the core walkthroughs for two or three tools can be captured in a few hours. The bottleneck is usually not the recording itself but deciding which processes to document first. Starting with the five things you explain most often to new hires is the fastest path to something useful.
What if our tools change frequently?
Tools that let you edit individual steps, like Scribe and Guideless, make updates much less painful than raw screen recordings. When a screen changes, you update that one step rather than remaking the whole guide. Building with maintainability in mind from the start pays off quickly in teams where software updates frequently.
Should guides be public or behind a login?
For internal team training, most tools let you restrict access to people with the link or to specific email domains. For customer-facing guides, public links are usually fine. Either way, you control access at the sharing stage.
What if the new employee works in a different time zone?
That is exactly where async training shines. The guide is there when they need it, regardless of where you are. No scheduling, no waiting for overlap hours. The new starter can complete their onboarding at whatever time works for them.
Do I need to remake guides for every platform or browser?
Generally no. Software walkthroughs captured on one browser typically look the same as what the new employee sees, assuming they are using the same tool. If your team uses a mix of operating systems or browsers and the UI differs meaningfully between them, it is worth noting that in the guide or creating a brief variation.
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