Employee Onboarding Checklist
A step-by-step onboarding checklist for new employees. Covers pre-arrival setup, day one essentials, first week tasks, and 30-day integration milestones.
Checklist preview
- Employment contract signed and filed
- Equipment ordered (laptop, peripherals)
- System accounts created (email, Slack, HR system)
- Access permissions configured for role
- Welcome email sent with first-day instructions
- Buddy or onboarding mentor assigned
- First-day schedule prepared and shared
- New hire welcomed and introduced to the team
- Equipment handed over and working
- Office or remote setup walkthrough done
- Security and acceptable-use policy reviewed
- HR paperwork completed (tax forms, direct deposit, benefits)
- Company handbook reviewed and acknowledged
- Core tools tour completed (communication, task management)
- Role and responsibilities explained in detail
- Key team members and stakeholders introduced
- First project or task assigned
- 1-on-1 with manager scheduled
- Team meeting or standup attended
- Internal documentation access confirmed
- All required training modules started
- 30-day check-in meeting completed
- Initial performance expectations reviewed
- Outstanding access or tool issues resolved
- New hire questions and feedback collected
- Training modules completed
- Onboarding officially closed in HR system
A structured employee onboarding checklist reduces the time it takes a new hire to become productive and ensures nothing critical is missed between offer acceptance and the end of the first month.
Use it as a new employee onboarding checklist for any role — from individual contributors to managers. It follows the four natural phases: pre-arrival setup, day one essentials, first-week tasks, and a 30-day integration check-in. Works equally well as an HR onboarding checklist run by People Ops or as a manager-led onboarding plan for new hires.
Who uses this onboarding checklist
HR managers and People Ops teams running onboarding for multiple new hires. Team leads and department managers who own the first-week experience. IT teams running an IT onboarding checklist in parallel for system access. Operations teams responsible for equipment setup and access provisioning.
How to run it
Open CheckRun on any internal page — your HRIS, your company wiki, or even a blank tab. Select this template, start a run, and work through each section as the hire progresses. The run is automatically tied to the current URL and saved to history when you finish.
Run a separate checklist instance per new hire: each run saves independently with its own timestamp and completion record.
Adapting this checklist for your onboarding process
The default items cover the common baseline. Adjust for your company:
- Add role-specific sections (e.g. “Engineering Setup” for developers: IDE, repo access, local environment) to turn this into an IT onboarding checklist for technical hires
- Add a “Legal & Compliance” section for regulated industries (NDA, background check, compliance training)
- Replace “30-day check-in” with “60/90-day” milestones if your onboarding process is longer
- Use it as a client onboarding checklist or vendor onboarding checklist by replacing HR-specific items with account setup, contract review, and tool access steps
- Remove pre-arrival items if HR handles those through a separate new employee orientation checklist
Why a checklist beats a spreadsheet
Spreadsheet-based onboarding tracking breaks down when you have multiple hires at different stages. CheckRun keeps each hire’s checklist as a separate run, saved with date and status. You can review any past run, see exactly which items passed or failed, and export the history as CSV for reporting.
Related templates
- New Hire Checklist — manager-facing checklist tracking what the company prepares before and during the first 30 days
- Offboarding Checklist — mirrors this template for the exit process: access revocation, asset return, knowledge transfer