6 Checklists to Perfect Your New Employee Onboarding Process

In this post, I’m 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 that’s for a good reason.

Checklists help you to follow a process, make sure you don’t neglect anything important and stay compliant.

Instead of making you write your own, you can use one of the 6 we’ve 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 you’re 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 🙂

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 before 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 onboarding 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 employee 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 the 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 has 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!