Virtual Tours for Onboarding: A Step-by-Step Guide

Kyla Ball July 27, 2026

Your new hire’s first day shouldn’t be the first time they see your workplace. By the time someone walks through the door, they’re already managing a flood of names, processes, policies, and expectations. A virtual tour for onboarding changes that dynamic entirely.

With the right setup, new employees can explore your workplace, meet key teams, and absorb essential information before they even arrive. This guide walks you through exactly how to build one using ThingLink.

Why Virtual Tours Work So Well for Employee Onboarding

Onboarding is often rushed, and the pressure to deliver everything in the first week means a lot of critical information simply doesn’t land. Virtual tours solve this by letting new hires move at their own pace, revisit locations, and absorb context without the anxiety of a live walkthrough.

For operations and training managers, there’s a practical advantage too. Once your virtual onboarding tour is built, it scales. Every new joiner gets the same quality experience, whether they’re starting in your head office, a regional site, or remotely from another country.

Technology company Vaisala took exactly this approach, using a ThingLink virtual tour to introduce prospective talent to their campus and culture before they’d even applied. You can read how they did it in the Vaisala case study.

For a broader look at the business case, the ThingLink blog post on workplace virtual tours for onboarding is a great starting point.

What to Include in Your Onboarding Virtual Tour

In action! Explore this example.

Before you open any editing tool, decide what your new hire actually needs to know. A strong onboarding virtual tour typically covers:

• Key physical locations: Reception, HR, their team’s work area, meeting rooms, welfare facilities, and emergency exits
• Team introductions: Short video clips or photo tags introducing managers and teammates by name and role
• Essential policies: Health and safety briefings, IT access procedures, and code of conduct summaries embedded directly into relevant spaces
• Culture and values: A welcome message from leadership, links to internal resources, and context about what makes your organisation tick
• Practical how-tos: How to book a meeting room, use the coffee machine, submit expenses, or access the staff intranet

Think of each room or area as a scene. Each scene can carry its own layer of tagged information, so the tour is spatially logical rather than a flat list of documents.

Step-by-Step: How to Build Your Tour in ThingLink

Step 1: Capture Your Spaces

Start by photographing the key areas of your workplace. For the most immersive result, use a 360-degree camera to capture equirectangular images. Standard flat photographs work well too, especially for floor plans, team photos, and supporting visuals.

If your organisation has multiple sites, you can include all of them in one tour and let new hires navigate between locations using scene links.

Step 2: Upload and Build Your Scenes

Upload your images to ThingLink and begin adding interactive tags to each scene. Tags can contain text, images, videos, audio clips, PDFs, links, and embedded forms. Place them on the relevant spots in each image so the information feels contextual rather than generic.

For example, tagging the fire exit with a short safety video, or tagging a colleague’s desk with a short introductory clip, makes the experience feel natural and intuitive.

Step 3: Add a Floor Plan for Navigation

One of the most useful features for onboarding tours is the floor plan overlay. ThingLink allows you to add a floor plan image that appears in the corner of the tour, giving your viewer a persistent sense of where they are in the building and how scenes connect.

To set this up, upload your floor plan as a separate ThingLink scene, add transit tags that link each point on the map to its corresponding location scene, and embed it into your tour. The floor plan support article has a full walkthrough.

Step 4: Create a Guided Viewing Path

For onboarding specifically, you may want new hires to move through content in a particular order rather than exploring freely. ThingLink’s media editor supports guided and locked viewing experiences, so you can structure the journey without removing the sense of exploration.

If you want to build a more structured, scenario-based path, the Scenario Builder lets you create sequential learning experiences with branching options. This works especially well for compliance training or role-specific orientation content.

Step 5: Make It Interactive and Testable

Don’t stop at information delivery. Embed quizzes, acknowledgement forms, or short knowledge checks directly into the tour to confirm that new hires have absorbed key content. For a more engaging approach, you could even build a short onboarding escape room that challenges new starters to find information by exploring the environment. ThingLink’s guide to building immersive escape rooms gives you a practical framework for this.

Step 6: Share and Track

Once your tour is ready, share it via a link, embed it in your HR platform or LMS, or send it directly to new hires as part of their pre-boarding pack. ThingLink tours are accessible on desktop, mobile, and tablet with no software installation required.

For organisations deploying VR headsets such as Meta Quest or PICO, ThingLink content is fully viewable in VR mode via the ThingLink XR app. This is particularly effective for site inductions at manufacturing plants, logistics hubs, or any environment where spatial awareness matters. You can read more in the ThingLink VR overview and the ThingLink XR on Meta Quest post.

Real-World Applications: Who Is Using This Approach?

A luxury hospitality brand used ThingLink virtual tours to train staff on brand standards and prepare them for guest interactions across multiple properties. The tour format allowed consistent training delivery regardless of location. Read the full story in the luxury brand staff training case study.

Tips for Making Your Onboarding Tour Genuinely Useful

• Keep scenes focused. Too many tags in one scene creates cognitive overload. Aim for three to six tags per image.
• Use real voices and faces. Video messages from actual team members are far more engaging than text alone.
• Update it regularly. An onboarding tour that shows outdated office layouts or former staff members undermines trust. Build a review cycle into your maintenance calendar.
• Test it with a recent starter. Ask someone who joined in the last three months to complete the tour and give you feedback before you roll it out widely.

Start Building Your Onboarding Tour Today

Virtual tours for onboarding aren’t a nice-to-have. They’re a practical, scalable solution to one of training’s most persistent challenges: how do you give every new hire the same quality introduction to your organisation, regardless of when or where they start?

ThingLink gives you all the tools to build it.