I onboarded Claude like a new hire. Five things, and it works like a coworker.

I gave myself a challenge: set up Claude so it works like a real member of my finance team. Not a chatbot. A coworker. One that knows my company, writes the way my team writes, connects to my tools, and produces work I can actually send to a CFO.

It took exactly five things to set up. I filmed the whole build, and the guide with every prompt from the video is the download at the end.

Think of it as onboarding, not prompting

Here’s the mental model that makes everything click. Imagine you just hired someone new. Smart, fast, eager to help. But on day one they know nothing: not your company, not your systems, not how you like things done. That’s Claude out of the box. Brilliant, but generic.

So what do you do with a new hire? You onboard them. And there are five things every new hire needs to become effective. They’re the same five things you set up in Claude.

1. The project: your onboarding binder

When a new hire walks in, you hand them the binder: who we are, what we do, how we work. In Claude that’s the project. In the guide there’s a prompt that flips the interview around: it tells Claude to ask you about your company, your team, your metrics, your chart of accounts, one section at a time. The same questions a smart new hire would ask in their first week.

And you don’t have to type everything. Upload the documents you already have, your org chart, your latest variance report, your chart of accounts, and Claude fills in the gaps from those instead of asking. In the video I run it for a fictional consulting firm and it produces the document every new analyst wishes they got on day one: business model, team structure, metrics with definitions and targets, reporting schedules, the close playbook, all in one place.

2. The style: behavior expectations

The binder isn’t enough. You also sit the new hire down and set expectations. Not “use this font.” Real behavior: lead with the conclusion. Explain the driver, not just the number. Write like you’re briefing your CFO in an elevator. Board reports get one page, maximum. Emails lead with the headline numbers. Slack updates are one sentence.

That’s a Style in Claude. You set it once and it applies to every conversation after. Whatever expectations you’d set for a real team member, you set the same ones here, and unlike some team members, Claude follows them every single time.

3. Connections: their login credentials

A new hire needs access to your systems. For Claude, those bridges are called MCPs, and the idea is simpler than the name: a live connection between Claude and a tool. Connect your calendar and Claude can actually check your conflicts. Same for Gmail, Notion, and a growing list, all reviewed and one click away in the Cowork connectors panel.

My favorite part is the permissions. I let Claude read my email freely, but writing or deleting needs my approval. You’d set the same boundaries for a new hire’s system access. Start with the two tools you use most and add more later.

4. Reference files: what good looks like

Think about your own first weeks in a job. What helped most was never the policy manual. It was someone pulling up last month’s report and saying “here’s what a good one looks like. Do it like this.”

That’s a reference folder: your best work, dropped into a folder before you even start. Past reports, emails, templates. When I ask for a variance analysis now, it follows the same structure, tone, and level of detail as my examples, because it’s not guessing. It has the example right there.

5. Skills: the SOPs

After a few months, a good hire writes down their processes so they run perfectly every time. That’s a skill: trigger, audience, deadline, inputs, the steps, the output format. My monthly P&L variance skill literally reads: map actuals to budget, calculate line variances, flag what’s material, decompose revenue into volume, price, and mix. No code anywhere. If you can explain a process to a new hire step by step, you can write a skill.

What it feels like when it’s all running

Fifth business day of the month. I open Cowork on my project folder. Claude already knows my company (the binder). I ask it to check my calendar for conflicts (the access). I hand it the actuals and it writes the commentary in my voice, conclusion first (the style plus the references). With the skill, the full analysis runs in about thirty seconds, and the email draft is sitting in my drafts folder.

And I do what’s actually my job: the judgment calls, the story behind the numbers, the conversations with the business. You don’t build a coworker to replace your thinking. You build one to handle the repetitive work so you can do more with your thinking.

Get the setup guide

The download has all five setup prompts from the video: the project interview, the style builder, the connections walkthrough, the reference folder structure, and the skill template. It works for FP&A, accounting, consulting, or any knowledge work. Start with an empty folder, and by the end you have a coworker.