How to Create an Onboarding Checklist for New Employees
Use this template to equip your new hires to excel, streamline your onboarding, and retain employees longer.
A well-executed onboarding leads to 58% of new employees staying at a company for at least three years. The best onboarding process finds the balance between the employee’s needs, helping them embody the company’s culture, and practical moments that are unplanned.
What is onboarding?
Onboarding is the process where new hires gain the skills, knowledge, and capabilities they need to become productive employees of an organization.
However, onboarding is more than just providing training materials and signing documents. Done right, it’s the first step in building loyalty with your employees which means they’ll probably stick around for the long term.
According to HRCI, well-executed onboarding leads to 58% of new employees staying at a company for at least three years. Glassdoor also states that a solid onboarding process can help new hires achieve up to 70% productivity after starting a new job.
However, a successful onboarding process isn’t just about completing paperwork and dictating rules. It is your opportunity as a manager to make a great first impression and show new employees that they’ve chosen the right company.
What is an onboarding checklist?
An onboarding checklist is a way for hiring managers to organize the steps involved in guiding new hires through their first days and months at a company.
The checklist ensures that each critical stage of the new hire onboarding process is complete. It provides a starting point for procedures specific to a job role.
However, you should note that completing an onboarding checklist doesn’t necessarily translate into a successful onboarding. The best onboarding process finds the balance between the employee’s needs, helping them embody the company’s culture, and practical moments that are unplanned.
What to include in an onboarding checklist?
Here are a few things every onboarding checklist should have:
- Recruitment process
- Role of the employee
- Goal setting
- Job training
- Introduction to company culture
- Dates for check-ins
- Meeting with other employees or superiors
- Documentation
- Learning the product
Pre-onboarding checklist
According to Aberdeen, companies that perform pre-onboarding retain 81% of new hires during their first year of employment.
The goal is to let new hires know what to expect during the early days and what the company wants from them in the long run. See how Asana runs their pre-onboarding process.
Send welcome email to new employee
The welcome email is a document you send to a new employee to welcome them and prepare for their first day. Your goal is to make them feel appreciated and accepted as part of your team. You’ll also need to provide useful details such as what will happen and where to go.
When writing the welcome email, confirm details like office location (for hybrid or office roles), start date, and time. Tell them who to report to and if they should bring anything along when coming such as social security information and banking details.
Overall, you want the employee to feel optimistic and excited about working with you, not scared and overwhelmed.
Here are some ways to customize your email:
- Be personal
- Show excitement
- Consider formatting
- Show your company spirit
- Ask them if they have any questions or concerns about their first day
Pro tip: Consider assigning your new hire an employee buddy. Have them reach out to welcome the new employee and set up a time to say hello and answer any questions.
Send email to existing employees
The email to existing employees is an opportunity to inform your team about the new hire. Share details about the employee’s work experience, background, education, and skill set. Build a positive image so it’s easier for existing employees to establish rapport with the new hire.
Also, encourage the team members to share their expertise and to spend time introducing themselves and what they do at the company.
Discuss roles and goals with supervisor
Who will the new hire report to? What will be their duties and responsibilities? Make sure you’ve mapped this out with their superiors and other stakeholders.
Prepare the office for new employees
Whether it’s a cubicle, office, or desk, ensure that it’s ready and equipped before the new employee starts. When a new hire sees that they have a dedicated workspace prepared, it shows that you’ve put effort into making them feel welcome.
Employee onboarding checklists
First-day onboarding agenda
Office tour
Assuming they’re not full-time remote employees, on the first day, give your new hires a guided tour of the company and introduce them to their co-workers. Besides showing them where everything is, the tour should also make your new employees enthusiastic about coming to work every day. So if you have a fun game room, yoga center, or some innovative equipment that you’re proud of, don’t hesitate to show off.
Help your new hire set up a workspace
In the office?
Show them their new office, tools they’ll be working with, and co-workers they may be sharing space with. Don’t forget to share company rules regarding workspace design and customization.
Working from home?
If your company has a budget for helping your new hire create a comfortable home office, make sure to share any guidelines on day one.
Ask new employees to complete HR documents
Once they have a desk, provide the new hires with the HR forms needed to complete their documentation for pay, benefits, taxes, and more. Let them know what to do if they need help with completing the forms.
Meet with managers and executives
After the new hires have met their co-workers and tested their workstations, it’s time to meet the executives or superiors. To save time, arrange an open orientation meeting where managers and executives introduce themselves to the new hires and share a few words of encouragement. For smaller companies, meeting the managers and executives can be one-on-one.
Assign training materials
Provide your new employees with the resources they need to do their jobs and achieve desired outcomes. You can use Guru to share training documents and track the progress of your employee’s onboarding. Guru makes it easy for employees to learn at their own pace and allows you to track what they’ve read.
Discuss expectations
How will success be determined? Setting clear expectations with employees equips them to monitor their performance and aim for the best results.
Discuss company culture
Company culture goes beyond guidelines and rules that employees must adhere to within and outside the workplace.
A strong company culture not only attracts the best candidates but also helps you retain employees. Communicating your company’s culture during onboarding helps employees to understand the company's values, their roles, and how these overlap. A culture that employees love also improves productivity, performance, and engagement.
Assign mentor or buddy
According to the Harvard Business Review, assigning an onboarding buddy ensures that a new hire is productive within the first 90 days at a new job.
Mentoring programs are a great way for new hires to learn on-the-job skills from senior employees. Mentoring aligns organizational goals with an employee’s career goals and gives them the feeling of engagement which leads to increased job satisfaction.
Take them out for lunch
If your organization can’t afford to take every new hire to a fancy lunch, that’s understandable. An alternative is to commemorate your new hires with drinks, snacks, a round of applause, or anything else that shows you’re glad to have them on board.
First week onboarding checklist
Onboarding never ends. It’s a continuous process from the moment a new employee arrives until the day they leave. The first week is about making sure your new hire is invested in the company’s culture and reinforcing the value you see in them. Hence, tasks should be tied to corporate culture.
A few things to do in the first week of onboarding include:
- Check-in daily to see how they’re adjusting to a new work environment
- Schedule training
- Show them how to use company software
- Introduce them to other teammates
- Recommending useful resources for growth
- Organize social activities to help new workers bond with their colleagues
- Use employee feedback to improve the onboarding process
First month onboarding checklist
A few things to do in the first 30 days of onboarding include:
- Hold weekly meetings with new employees
- Bring them into ongoing projects, but nothing too complicated
- Help them learn company-specific platforms, training resources, and intranet systems
- Provide feedback on specific tasks. Remember to go easy since they’re still learning the ropes
- Facilitate relationship building
- Conduct an onboarding survey to determine how well a new employee has integrated into your company
- Perform a progress review and schedule relevant training based on the results of the review
90-day onboarding checklist
After 90 days, a few things to do include:
- Get your employee to start working autonomously on projects and become accountable for their work
- Regularly touch base with supervisor for feedback about KPIs and metrics going forward
- Review performance goals to ensure it’s realistic and achievable
- Collect employee feedback about the new hire orientation program
- Continue to facilitate socialization and relationship building in the organization
- Consider job shadowing if your employee is having trouble settling in or reaching KPIs
6-month onboarding checklist
If they’ve made it to the 6-month milestone, that’s amazing! Arrange a performance evaluation to review achievements and discuss goals to be achieved at the one-year mark.
First-year review
By the end of the year, your new hire should be fully integrated at the company. Give your employees feedback on their performance and show them areas they can improve.
Onboarding checklist templates for different departments
You don’t have to create an onboarding checklist from scratch. At Guru, we have several onboarding templates that you can tweak to match your employee onboarding needs. You can try our free onboarding template for HR managers, sales reps, IT staff, and remote employees.
HR onboarding template
Guru’s human resources onboarding template includes a list of activities for each stage of an onboarding process. You can create a list of tasks, mark the status for each completed task, and add notes.
Onboarding template for managers
Managers should use this checklist template to ensure they cover each stage of an onboarding program. The template includes onboarding responsibilities from pre-onboarding, guiding them through the first day, providing performance evaluations, and getting feedback.
Onboarding template for sales teams
There’s a unique culture with a sales team that requires unique training. Use this sales onboarding checklist to complete training on marketing, product use cases, company mission, and sales tactics.
Onboarding template for IT
Without the right tools, new hires experience friction that prevents them from doing their job. The IT department provides regular support to prevent wasted time and ensure smooth onboarding. Use this checklist to ensure the IT team provides new hires with a company email account, computing devices, internal system access, and security clearance.
Onboarding template for remote employees
Onboarding remote employees can be tricky because it’s all happening behind a screen. However, the goals are still the same. The noticeable difference is the lack of spontaneous opportunities for team bonding and in-person learning that helps new employees get the lay of the land.
Use this remote onboarding template to create an onboarding process that gets your new hire on the right track quickly.
How to use Guru for employee onboarding?
Flexible onboarding
Starting a new job is already stressful. Having to search for onboarding materials on multiple platforms makes it even more stressful. With Guru, your new employees can access all onboarding knowledge from one central platform rather than navigating separate solutions.
Guru is also flexible enough to allow employees to consume knowledge in their own way and at their own pace and rather than forcing them to complete modules in a strict order. We want your team to have autonomy from day one and that happens by customizing onboarding to engage your new team member.
All your company knowledge in one place
When knowledge is easy to find, productivity soars. Guru lets you pull all your company policies, job descriptions, team processes, training modules, and other onboarding documents in one place.
Use our Card editor to add multiple content formats such as PDFs, images, and videos. You can also add content from other apps like Google Docs. Want to make changes? Use our in-app editing to update embedded content right inside Guru.
Empower new hires to get help when they need it
Guru provides chat integration so you can stay in the loop with your new teammate wherever you are. You can integrate Guru into your company’s Slack channel and share it with your any employee.
If your new employee is feeling overwhelmed with new knowledge, use Guru’s Knowledge Triggers to push the most relevant information to your employees.
Lower onboarding costs
The average cost of onboarding a single employee is over $4,700 and it’s only going to increase with each year that passes.
Real-time analytics to improve the onboarding process
How do you know if your new hire needs help? Guru provides user-level data that shows the progress your employee is making with the onboarding process. You can view the keywords they search for the most and what they’re reading.
Want to know if new employees have read an important document you sent through? Use Guru’s Card-level data to make sure everyone has seen the information you shared. If they haven’t read a specific Card, you can follow up and remind them.
Curious to see how Guru uses Guru for employee onboarding? Check out this post by Hillary Curran, Guru’s Director of Customer Experience.
What is the ROI of an effective onboarding program?
Happy employees help businesses succeed. According to Glassdoor, efficient onboarding can improve new hire retention by up to 82%.
A great onboarding process enables employees to reach full competency more quickly and start making money for your company.
A few ways that companies realize an ROI from great onboarding include:
- Automating onboarding tasks
- Increasing company-wide efficiency
- Adding focus time
- Giving new employees confidence
- Reducing the time it takes for new employees to get settled in and ramped up
- Reducing costs when training new hires
Build employee onboarding into your company culture
Making onboarding a part of your culture makes new hires feel welcome, engaged, and eager to contribute to your company’s growth. However, onboarding success won’t happen without a streamlined process. If all onboarding resources and training are spread across different tools and one-off Slack messages, it’s easy for new hires to feel stressed and isolated.
Invest in onboarding software that consolidates all of the materials that new hires need to get off to a great start. It’s the perfect way to empower them in their positions and improve overall productivity.
What is onboarding?
Onboarding is the process where new hires gain the skills, knowledge, and capabilities they need to become productive employees of an organization.
However, onboarding is more than just providing training materials and signing documents. Done right, it’s the first step in building loyalty with your employees which means they’ll probably stick around for the long term.
According to HRCI, well-executed onboarding leads to 58% of new employees staying at a company for at least three years. Glassdoor also states that a solid onboarding process can help new hires achieve up to 70% productivity after starting a new job.
However, a successful onboarding process isn’t just about completing paperwork and dictating rules. It is your opportunity as a manager to make a great first impression and show new employees that they’ve chosen the right company.
What is an onboarding checklist?
An onboarding checklist is a way for hiring managers to organize the steps involved in guiding new hires through their first days and months at a company.
The checklist ensures that each critical stage of the new hire onboarding process is complete. It provides a starting point for procedures specific to a job role.
However, you should note that completing an onboarding checklist doesn’t necessarily translate into a successful onboarding. The best onboarding process finds the balance between the employee’s needs, helping them embody the company’s culture, and practical moments that are unplanned.
What to include in an onboarding checklist?
Here are a few things every onboarding checklist should have:
- Recruitment process
- Role of the employee
- Goal setting
- Job training
- Introduction to company culture
- Dates for check-ins
- Meeting with other employees or superiors
- Documentation
- Learning the product
Pre-onboarding checklist
According to Aberdeen, companies that perform pre-onboarding retain 81% of new hires during their first year of employment.
The goal is to let new hires know what to expect during the early days and what the company wants from them in the long run. See how Asana runs their pre-onboarding process.
Send welcome email to new employee
The welcome email is a document you send to a new employee to welcome them and prepare for their first day. Your goal is to make them feel appreciated and accepted as part of your team. You’ll also need to provide useful details such as what will happen and where to go.
When writing the welcome email, confirm details like office location (for hybrid or office roles), start date, and time. Tell them who to report to and if they should bring anything along when coming such as social security information and banking details.
Overall, you want the employee to feel optimistic and excited about working with you, not scared and overwhelmed.
Here are some ways to customize your email:
- Be personal
- Show excitement
- Consider formatting
- Show your company spirit
- Ask them if they have any questions or concerns about their first day
Pro tip: Consider assigning your new hire an employee buddy. Have them reach out to welcome the new employee and set up a time to say hello and answer any questions.
Send email to existing employees
The email to existing employees is an opportunity to inform your team about the new hire. Share details about the employee’s work experience, background, education, and skill set. Build a positive image so it’s easier for existing employees to establish rapport with the new hire.
Also, encourage the team members to share their expertise and to spend time introducing themselves and what they do at the company.
Discuss roles and goals with supervisor
Who will the new hire report to? What will be their duties and responsibilities? Make sure you’ve mapped this out with their superiors and other stakeholders.
Prepare the office for new employees
Whether it’s a cubicle, office, or desk, ensure that it’s ready and equipped before the new employee starts. When a new hire sees that they have a dedicated workspace prepared, it shows that you’ve put effort into making them feel welcome.
Employee onboarding checklists
First-day onboarding agenda
Office tour
Assuming they’re not full-time remote employees, on the first day, give your new hires a guided tour of the company and introduce them to their co-workers. Besides showing them where everything is, the tour should also make your new employees enthusiastic about coming to work every day. So if you have a fun game room, yoga center, or some innovative equipment that you’re proud of, don’t hesitate to show off.
Help your new hire set up a workspace
In the office?
Show them their new office, tools they’ll be working with, and co-workers they may be sharing space with. Don’t forget to share company rules regarding workspace design and customization.
Working from home?
If your company has a budget for helping your new hire create a comfortable home office, make sure to share any guidelines on day one.
Ask new employees to complete HR documents
Once they have a desk, provide the new hires with the HR forms needed to complete their documentation for pay, benefits, taxes, and more. Let them know what to do if they need help with completing the forms.
Meet with managers and executives
After the new hires have met their co-workers and tested their workstations, it’s time to meet the executives or superiors. To save time, arrange an open orientation meeting where managers and executives introduce themselves to the new hires and share a few words of encouragement. For smaller companies, meeting the managers and executives can be one-on-one.
Assign training materials
Provide your new employees with the resources they need to do their jobs and achieve desired outcomes. You can use Guru to share training documents and track the progress of your employee’s onboarding. Guru makes it easy for employees to learn at their own pace and allows you to track what they’ve read.
Discuss expectations
How will success be determined? Setting clear expectations with employees equips them to monitor their performance and aim for the best results.
Discuss company culture
Company culture goes beyond guidelines and rules that employees must adhere to within and outside the workplace.
A strong company culture not only attracts the best candidates but also helps you retain employees. Communicating your company’s culture during onboarding helps employees to understand the company's values, their roles, and how these overlap. A culture that employees love also improves productivity, performance, and engagement.
Assign mentor or buddy
According to the Harvard Business Review, assigning an onboarding buddy ensures that a new hire is productive within the first 90 days at a new job.
Mentoring programs are a great way for new hires to learn on-the-job skills from senior employees. Mentoring aligns organizational goals with an employee’s career goals and gives them the feeling of engagement which leads to increased job satisfaction.
Take them out for lunch
If your organization can’t afford to take every new hire to a fancy lunch, that’s understandable. An alternative is to commemorate your new hires with drinks, snacks, a round of applause, or anything else that shows you’re glad to have them on board.
First week onboarding checklist
Onboarding never ends. It’s a continuous process from the moment a new employee arrives until the day they leave. The first week is about making sure your new hire is invested in the company’s culture and reinforcing the value you see in them. Hence, tasks should be tied to corporate culture.
A few things to do in the first week of onboarding include:
- Check-in daily to see how they’re adjusting to a new work environment
- Schedule training
- Show them how to use company software
- Introduce them to other teammates
- Recommending useful resources for growth
- Organize social activities to help new workers bond with their colleagues
- Use employee feedback to improve the onboarding process
First month onboarding checklist
A few things to do in the first 30 days of onboarding include:
- Hold weekly meetings with new employees
- Bring them into ongoing projects, but nothing too complicated
- Help them learn company-specific platforms, training resources, and intranet systems
- Provide feedback on specific tasks. Remember to go easy since they’re still learning the ropes
- Facilitate relationship building
- Conduct an onboarding survey to determine how well a new employee has integrated into your company
- Perform a progress review and schedule relevant training based on the results of the review
90-day onboarding checklist
After 90 days, a few things to do include:
- Get your employee to start working autonomously on projects and become accountable for their work
- Regularly touch base with supervisor for feedback about KPIs and metrics going forward
- Review performance goals to ensure it’s realistic and achievable
- Collect employee feedback about the new hire orientation program
- Continue to facilitate socialization and relationship building in the organization
- Consider job shadowing if your employee is having trouble settling in or reaching KPIs
6-month onboarding checklist
If they’ve made it to the 6-month milestone, that’s amazing! Arrange a performance evaluation to review achievements and discuss goals to be achieved at the one-year mark.
First-year review
By the end of the year, your new hire should be fully integrated at the company. Give your employees feedback on their performance and show them areas they can improve.
Onboarding checklist templates for different departments
You don’t have to create an onboarding checklist from scratch. At Guru, we have several onboarding templates that you can tweak to match your employee onboarding needs. You can try our free onboarding template for HR managers, sales reps, IT staff, and remote employees.
HR onboarding template
Guru’s human resources onboarding template includes a list of activities for each stage of an onboarding process. You can create a list of tasks, mark the status for each completed task, and add notes.
Onboarding template for managers
Managers should use this checklist template to ensure they cover each stage of an onboarding program. The template includes onboarding responsibilities from pre-onboarding, guiding them through the first day, providing performance evaluations, and getting feedback.
Onboarding template for sales teams
There’s a unique culture with a sales team that requires unique training. Use this sales onboarding checklist to complete training on marketing, product use cases, company mission, and sales tactics.
Onboarding template for IT
Without the right tools, new hires experience friction that prevents them from doing their job. The IT department provides regular support to prevent wasted time and ensure smooth onboarding. Use this checklist to ensure the IT team provides new hires with a company email account, computing devices, internal system access, and security clearance.
Onboarding template for remote employees
Onboarding remote employees can be tricky because it’s all happening behind a screen. However, the goals are still the same. The noticeable difference is the lack of spontaneous opportunities for team bonding and in-person learning that helps new employees get the lay of the land.
Use this remote onboarding template to create an onboarding process that gets your new hire on the right track quickly.
How to use Guru for employee onboarding?
Flexible onboarding
Starting a new job is already stressful. Having to search for onboarding materials on multiple platforms makes it even more stressful. With Guru, your new employees can access all onboarding knowledge from one central platform rather than navigating separate solutions.
Guru is also flexible enough to allow employees to consume knowledge in their own way and at their own pace and rather than forcing them to complete modules in a strict order. We want your team to have autonomy from day one and that happens by customizing onboarding to engage your new team member.
All your company knowledge in one place
When knowledge is easy to find, productivity soars. Guru lets you pull all your company policies, job descriptions, team processes, training modules, and other onboarding documents in one place.
Use our Card editor to add multiple content formats such as PDFs, images, and videos. You can also add content from other apps like Google Docs. Want to make changes? Use our in-app editing to update embedded content right inside Guru.
Empower new hires to get help when they need it
Guru provides chat integration so you can stay in the loop with your new teammate wherever you are. You can integrate Guru into your company’s Slack channel and share it with your any employee.
If your new employee is feeling overwhelmed with new knowledge, use Guru’s Knowledge Triggers to push the most relevant information to your employees.
Lower onboarding costs
The average cost of onboarding a single employee is over $4,700 and it’s only going to increase with each year that passes.
Real-time analytics to improve the onboarding process
How do you know if your new hire needs help? Guru provides user-level data that shows the progress your employee is making with the onboarding process. You can view the keywords they search for the most and what they’re reading.
Want to know if new employees have read an important document you sent through? Use Guru’s Card-level data to make sure everyone has seen the information you shared. If they haven’t read a specific Card, you can follow up and remind them.
Curious to see how Guru uses Guru for employee onboarding? Check out this post by Hillary Curran, Guru’s Director of Customer Experience.
What is the ROI of an effective onboarding program?
Happy employees help businesses succeed. According to Glassdoor, efficient onboarding can improve new hire retention by up to 82%.
A great onboarding process enables employees to reach full competency more quickly and start making money for your company.
A few ways that companies realize an ROI from great onboarding include:
- Automating onboarding tasks
- Increasing company-wide efficiency
- Adding focus time
- Giving new employees confidence
- Reducing the time it takes for new employees to get settled in and ramped up
- Reducing costs when training new hires
Build employee onboarding into your company culture
Making onboarding a part of your culture makes new hires feel welcome, engaged, and eager to contribute to your company’s growth. However, onboarding success won’t happen without a streamlined process. If all onboarding resources and training are spread across different tools and one-off Slack messages, it’s easy for new hires to feel stressed and isolated.
Invest in onboarding software that consolidates all of the materials that new hires need to get off to a great start. It’s the perfect way to empower them in their positions and improve overall productivity.
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