The traditional new-hire IT experience is a half-day. The laptop arrives at the office, somebody from IT unboxes it, signs in with a temporary credential, installs the apps, configures the email, sets up the printers, adds the bookmarks, copies the developer's dotfiles, and hands the machine over with a sticky note. If the new hire is remote, the half-day becomes a half-week of shipping, scheduling, and Zoom screen-shares.
The well-configured Mac fleet, with ABM and a working MDM, doesn't need any of that. The Mac arrives at the new hire's house (or desk). They open it. They go through Apple's first-boot setup. At the "sign in" step, they enter their corporate email. The MDM takes over from there: applies the security baseline, installs the company app catalog, configures Wi-Fi, sets up the printer drivers, installs the password manager, joins the device to the directory. Fifteen minutes after they opened the box, the laptop is configured.
The work that makes this possible isn't on the laptop. It's the configuration in your MDM — the policies, the app assignments, the network profiles, the security baseline — that gets defined once and applied automatically to every new device. The first time you set this up, it takes a day or two of careful work. After that, the entire process scales: ten new hires next month gets handled the same way as one new hire next week.
The hidden benefit is that the same automation handles offboarding. When somebody leaves, the MDM lock-and-wipe the device remotely; their corporate access ends with their account; the laptop comes back to the company and gets re-enrolled for the next person. The whole "who has what" question that gets messy at growing companies stays clean because the answer always lives in the MDM, not in somebody's spreadsheet.