In this post, Iโm going to define and explain the benefits of employee onboarding, then give you access to six employee onboarding checklists.
Use them on their own or import into Process Street, so you can track and automate the work in Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Why checklists?
Well, checklists are the most popular way to onboard new employees, and thatโs for a good reason.
Checklists help you to follow a process, make sure you donโt neglect anything important and stay compliant.
Instead of making you write your own, you can use one of the 6 weโve prepared for you as a basis, and either take it as it is or modify it for your business.
Reported by Dr. John Sullivan, recruiting advisor and professor of human relations, the statistics show that:
- 50 percent of new hires are fired or quit during their first six months
- 40 percent of new CEOs fail in their first 18 months
- Up to 60 percent of new management employees fail during their first 18 months
For too many companies, the recruiting process has become expensive causing lost revenue and damaging to company morale.
Luckily, a new employee onboarding process flow can prevent such mistakes from occurring.
If youโre looking to put your best foot forward in making new hires feel welcome, a new employee onboarding checklist can do the trick.
Can’t wait? Just want the checklists? Here you go ๐
6 employee onboarding checklists
- General Employee Onboarding Checklist
- Call Center Employee Onboarding Checklist
- Retail Employee Onboarding Checklist
- Restaurant Employee Onboarding Checklist
- Developer Onboarding Checklist for Startups
- Salesperson Onboarding Checklist for Startups
Why onboard new employees?
If you want to retain the top talent, good employee onboarding is essential.
First impressions are everything.
Let me offer you some facts dropped by Christine Marino:
- Onboarding programs can increase retention by 25% and improve employee performance by 11%.
- Employees who participate in a structured onboarding program are 69% more likely to stay with an organization for 3 years.
- It takes 8-12 months for new hires to be as proficient as their tenured colleagues.
- 15% of employees said the lack of an effective onboarding program aided in their decision to quit.
And here’s something you really want to know about… it increases productivity, makes the new hire happier and saves you money.
But wait, let me back up a bit.
What is employee onboarding?
According to iCIMS “onboarding is the initial process of assimilating new hires into an organization”.
It covers steps such as:
- Preparations beforeย the starting day (preboarding)
- Introduction to tools used
- Orientation of the office
- Meeting the team
- Evaluating your employee’s onboarding experience afterwards
Employee onboarding checklists to the rescue
The statistics seem pretty grim, but don’t worry – help is here! A study conducted by Madeline Laurano in 2013 found more about the best onboarding strategies. As it turns out, the most commonly used strategy in the new employee onboardingย process is creating a checklist.
Coincidentally, Process Street has the right templates for you to use!
Scroll down to check out the employee onboarding checklists I have prepared for you and see if any fit what you’re looking for.
Our 6 new employee onboarding process templates
General Employee Onboarding Checklist
With the variety of jobs and professions, it’s hard to cover every single onboarding checklist (but we’re working on it!) so for now, I present you the ultimate new employee onboarding checklist.
While not job-specific (e.g. restaurants or retail) this checklist covers everything you can think of (but can’t always remember) to bring your employeeย up to speed with the company.
Use it, adjust it to your needs and start improving the way your employees perform their duties before they’ve even started!
Click here to get the general employee onboarding checklist.
Call Center Employee Onboarding Checklist
Call centers are fast paced environments commonly selling and supporting complex products.
Getting up to speed quickly not only helps retention but severely reduces the stress and anxiety of a new hire.
Think what it does to your customer satisfaction and your employee productivity and happiness!
Worry no longer as we have prepared a call center employee onboarding checklist for you to use, starting the day you hire a new employee.
We have made sure you do not miss a thing and worked hard so your new onboarding process is successful, employees happy and clients taken care of. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Click here to get the call center onboarding checklist.
Retail Employee Onboarding Checklist
Retail employee onboarding is often done in groups, through training presentations or remotely, through videos.
Employee orientation sessions, as they are often called, usually include information about the brand, the values of the company and how/why the company started up in the first place.
You own a great retail business and need people, just as great to work in it and help it succeed. Perhaps you once were a retail worker, perhaps not – either way – you once were an employee (unless you were born into a retail chain owner family in which case you need this checklist even more!).
If you look back to the days of working for someone else – can you remember your induction process? Can you trace back the steps of your onboarding? What would you have done differently? Did you wish you had more training and attention invested in you for you to feel valuable and prepared?
This is your chance to use theย retail employee onboarding checklist of your employee’s dreams. This checklist will make sure your employees are informed, trained and left with a smile on their face (which is exactly what you want given that they will be in direct contact to your customers).
Click here to get the retail onboarding checklist.
Restaurant Employee Onboarding Checklist
Hiring a new employee for your restaurant is very much like creating a new ad for it.
When you create a billboard or a TV promotion you hire a whole team to think of the best ways to engage the clients and prove your restaurant is the place to be.
A new hire is there to prove that your adverts were true – they interact with customers, create the whole experience and are with your customers all the way through.
Given how much time, money and energy you have spent in creating the perfect advert it is only logical you would invest the same attention into your employees – the live version of your restaurant’s promotion.
Here’s a checklist created for you to cover the basics on how to onboard your employees to ensure they are happy, prepared and ready to make your restaurant the one people want to come back to!
Get the restaurant employee onboarding checklist now and use it every time when you employ a new restaurant worker.
Click here to get the restaurant onboarding checklist.
Developer Onboarding Checklist for Startups
Developers are sometimes thrown in at the deep end when joining a new company, expected to teach themselves any parts of the code base and architecture they don’t know.
While this works for some people, it can be incredibly stressful and might make your new hire want to quit.
The costs of replacing a developer are tremendous if you think about the half-finished projects and time it would take for a new employee to fill the gaps – not to mention the incredibly high demand for software developers in today’s market – so we have created a developer onboarding checklist for you to use every time a developer joins your team.
Prepare them for what’s to come, make them feel welcome on their first day and keep up with their work in the following weeks by using this simple developer onboarding checklist.
Click here to get the developer onboarding checklist.
Salesperson Onboarding Checklist for Startups
It doesn’t matter whether your company specialized in B2B or B2C – you want your sales team up to the highest standard.
Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world and people don’t come to your company knowing everything. Work is becoming increasingly complex in today’s technologically driven world.
And I’m not talking about the job specifics entirely. Each company has their own tricks or if we get to a more basic level – different staff, office layout, dress code. All of these things, whilst familiar and even obvious for you, are going to be completely new to your employee.
At first, it must seem like a lot to cover, remember and deal with. There are plenty of steps, and who can remember them all? Now, that is exactly why Process Street hasย prepared this salesperson onboarding checklist for startups.
It will guide you every step of the way starting from the moment your new employee is hired. You will be taken through the first day, week and month. This template includes all the information you need, including double-checking your company handbook. We have thought about everything so all you need to do is get it here and start using it.
Click here to get the salesperson onboarding checklist.
Process Street for employee onboarding
Process Street is a people process platform. Manage employee onboarding, workflow automation, approvals and team handbooks all in one place using our no code platform.
Let me know in the comments if there’s an onboarding checklist your business would like us to make. Alternatively, get right to it and create your own – it’s easier than you think!
39 Comments
Thanks, you for giving information, it is very helpful
You’re welcome ๐
Pleased I found this post! I was looking for a sales onboarding checklist for a friend, so happy I found this article.
Awesome Josh, glad you found the onboarding checklist you were looking for. We have a whole library of them inside the app if you need more. I’d love to hear about how it works for you too.
Once the checklist is filled out for one new employee, do you uncheck it all to use for the next new employee or can you save for that particular employee and then start a new onboarding checklist for the next employee?
Hi Kim,
Once one checklist is finished, you just run a new one for the new employee. That way, you have a record of all employee onboarding activity in your company.
hello every one, I’m the administrator for onboarding in my company, I’m trying to find some ideas to develop our onboarding process ASAP. this article really helped.
Hey that’s good & organised Info, thanks. Perhaps people just look on-boarding as formality which shouldn’t be done. rather emotions needs to be added for better on boarding experience.
โค๏ธ
Awesome, not only helpful for the manager but only for all level of employee.
Thank you!
That’s right. You can also bring in employees into the checklists and have them complete tasks. We can even push those tasks to Slack or Microsoft Teams so they can complete the work there. Not just tasks, but they can consume content, fill out forms and more.
Must save it locally to read it before entering a new company ๐
This looks nice, thanks!
Thanks, Eli! Hope you get good use out of these onboarding checklists.
Best onboarding process .thanks for sharing.
That’s right Ronald, employee onboarding is our speciality ๐
Very well written Article. Effective onboarding has a measurable effect on a Company’s growth and hence improving the Employee satisfaction. Today only I saw a clip explaining some practices that can be followed while Onboarding a New Employee and out of which the point on โFirst Impressionโ I liked the most. Would like to share it with you all. Have a look on : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0e47Ywn6O8
Cool! Must share it to our HR Dept.
Thank you very much
Great, we have thousands of HR teams using Process Street today.
Thank you for sharing this helpful blog!
Great post Vinay! Have you ever used video for your onboarding strategy? A colleague use it often and told me it was quite easy to use. What do you think?
Yes many of our customers use videos with their onboarding checklists. You can upload videos directly to Process Street and include them as part of your workflows. You can also insert Loom, YouTube and Vimeo videos, so wherever you are hosting your employee onboarding videos, we can probably handle them!
Awesome, very useful for onboarding process must read this , thanks
Hi Vinay, very good article. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us! I believe that an effective onboarding process results in employees reaching peak performance and benefit the company sooner!
Thanks, Jessica, glad you enjoyed it! Jane on our team actually recently wrote a post on how to create an Employee Development plan which is a great follow on to this post that you might enjoy ๐ https://www.process.st/employee-development-plan/
Great checklist resources. I’m a big fan of checklist especially in software development and testing. It might seem low tech but I find that having one in place help avoid a lot of work that caused most software bug to escape into production. As part of a developer/tester checklist I also thing listing appropriate automation testing tools for each stage of the SDLC.
Great comment Joe. We have some agile development checklists here too in case you’re interested: https://www.process.st/agile-processes
Cheers,
Adam
Great Article, Vinay. I think this is an impressive list to keep while one creates one’s onboarding process. To make this entire process a lot easier, you can use smart tools to automate most of the steps.
Thanks for the recommendation Madhu ๐
Hurrah, thatโs what I was exploring for, love the data! existjng here at this blog.
Thanks Toto, we’ve recently update the post so I hope it’s a bit more relevant to todays changing times!
1 of the best explanations ever!! Refreshes minds of those who has no ideas or freshers. Leaves viewers at the stage where they can start their experimentation… Thanks a lot!!!
Thanks William, best of luck on your employee onboarding journey!
Great piece of information shared by you Vinay. I believe that would really helpful in onboarding next time.
You’re welcome Paul, glad it was helpful!
This new employee onboarding process will help us to understand the situation, thanks for sharing this information with us, subscribed your blog.
Awesome, thanks for the subscribe! We have a ton of employee onboarding content, we even have a whole podcast dedicated to it! – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-employee-onboarding-podcast/id1620182127
Thanks for sharing this post on employee onboarding, going to use some of the templates in our office!
You’re welcome Rober, hope it helps!