Onboarding Process Template: Step by Step

The new employee onboarding process, at a glance

Timings are our suggestions. Change them to fit your lead times.

Add a process owner at the top. That's one person who checks that each step has actually happened, whoever's name is against it.

The steps, one at a time

1. Confirm the hire

Everything downstream waits for this, and it's easily lost. Someone accepts an offer on the phone, the manager's delighted, and nobody tells the person who orders laptops.

Make the trigger a single, specific action. Our suggestion is that the hiring manager copies the master process, fills in the start date and sends the link to the owners of steps 2 and 3. Until that's happened, the hire doesn't officially exist for anyone else.

2. Start the paperwork

Contracts, checks that someone can work for you, payroll and tax details vary by country, and sometimes by region or employment type. Some have deadlines tied to the start date. Don't copy a list from another country's guide, including ours. Use official guidance where you are, list the steps here, and take qualified advice if you're unsure. Nothing on this page is legal advice.

3. Set up access and equipment

Everyone remembers this step, and it still runs late, because it depends on suppliers and on someone with admin rights being available.

Count back from the start date and write the deadline against it. Have someone test each login, because "it's been requested" and "it works" are two different states.

4. Write the plan

The manager writes what the new employee will focus on and which jobs they'll take on. Our onboarding plan template has the layout. Book the check-ins as you do it, so they're in the diary before anything else fills the week.

5. Send the welcome

A short, friendly message from the manager, covering the arrival time, where to go or which link to use, who'll meet them, what to bring and what the first day looks like. A person starting a new job is usually a bit nervous, so plain practical detail goes a long way.

6. Run day one

Aim for two things. They should feel expected, and they should go home knowing what the rest of the week holds. Sit with them while they log in, and give them something small and real to do before the day ends.

7. Run the first month

This is where the attention usually drops. The welcome's over and the manager's week is full again. The step only counts as finished when the first job's complete and the check-ins have happened, so someone has to look.

Hand the jobs over in stages. They watch, you do it together, and then they do it alone with you checking afterwards. The 30-60-90 day plan carries this on past the first month.

8. Review and improve

Hold a proper conversation around day 30. Then ask one question that's about the process itself: what did you need in your first month that nobody gave you?

Change the master copy that week. New starters notice what everyone else has stopped seeing, and this is your one chance to ask them before they stop seeing it too.

An example: who passes what to whom

This is a typical example we've made up: a twelve-person bookkeeping practice hiring an accounts assistant.

An offer is accepted on a Tuesday. The practice manager copies the master process and sends it to the office administrator, who owns paperwork and access. She orders the laptop that day and books the software licences for two weeks before the start date.

A week before, the assistant's team leader writes the first-month plan and the office administrator confirms the logins are tested. On the Wednesday before the start, the team leader sends the welcome. Day one and the first month are his, and a colleague acts as buddy.

Around day 30 the team leader holds the review. The new assistant says nobody showed them how client queries get logged. The practice manager, as process owner, adds it to week one in the master copy.

Nothing in that story is clever. It works because each person knows when their step starts and who's waiting on them.

Who owns each step in your team?

The right owners depend on who you've got. Pick the description closest to your business.

Turning this into your own process

1. Copy the table into Word, Google Docs or the tool your team already uses.
2. Replace job titles with names, and add a backup for each one.
3. Add your local legal steps to step 2.
4. Change the timings to your real lead times. If laptops take three weeks to arrive, step 3 starts earlier.
5. Choose the trigger for step 1 and tell everyone what it is.
6. Run it on your next hire, and expect to change it afterwards.

Then file it with the rest of your operations manual, so whoever's hiring next can find it.

How to tell if it's working

You won't need a dashboard. Look at four things after each hire.

• Did every login work on day one?
• Did they finish a real piece of work in week one?
• Did the check-ins happen on the booked dates?
• What did they say was missing, and has it been added?

If you get the same answer to the last question twice, you've found the part of the process that needs a proper fix.

The Business Operating Manual by SystemaFlow™, our free pack, won't run this process for you, because it doesn't include an onboarding system. It does help with two things that make the process easier: naming owners and backups on a Who Owns What page, and writing up the first job on a Task Card. All our systems are done-for-you templates in Word and PDF, and you keep them. They aren't software, so they'll sit alongside the tools you've already got.