The Ultimate New Hire Checklist (30+ Templates to Help Perfect the Process)

“I am very happy tonight to be a member of this company and to feel that I have had and will continue to have the support of such an able organization“. – IBM, Quintessential Quotes

Isn’t this something you would want to hear your team say?

IBM has a refined hiring process. Employees are the best fit, fully trained, and engaged within their role. By getting recruitment and employee onboarding processes right, IBM is happy and IBM’s employees are happy.

Like IBM, we at Process Street believe it is critical to get your hiring process right. This is why we give you every new hire checklist you will ever need to perfect your recruitment and employee onboarding processes.

Given that 46% of newly-hired employees quit within the first 18 months, there is no doubt that a polished process is what you need, to hire, train and keep your best team.

In this article, we have split the hiring process into two steps, for ease and simplicity:

1. Recruitment
2. Employee onboarding

Our new hire checklists are specifically adapted to cover recruitment and employee onboarding processes to ensure your team sings your praises. So, get the choir ready.

• What is a new hire checklist?
• Your key new hire checklists
• Taking a deeper dive into the hiring process
• Why your hiring process matters: Real-world examples of new hire processes gone wrong
• Use Process Street and our new hire checklists today
• Perfecting your hiring and onboarding processes with Process Street

Let’s dive in!

What is a new hire checklist?

A new hire checklist is a stepped process guiding you through all the necessary tasks to recruit and fully onboard a new employee. Below, I’m taking you through our two key new hire checklists, which you can use for free right now! They are designed to target your hiring and onboarding needs.

By using these two checklists, the fundamentals of your hiring and onboarding processes are covered. These two checklists create the bedrock on which you can build and refine your processes further.

You might think that these two checklists are enough. Sure, they definitely have A LOT to offer, but you can enhance your onboarding process that much more when you start refining these hiring processes. This helps create the right new hire process for your company.

Why you need to get your new hire process right

The hiring process begins with a need. A need for a new hire, one that will fit into your team. From there, the process involves interviewing, testing candidates, choosing between candidates, concluding your hiring decision and finally conducting employee onboarding processes.

As a process, hiring a new employee is not something to be taken lightly. I mean, look a the facts:

• 500,000 new managers, from Fortune 500 companies, transition into alternative roles or companies each year.
• It is estimated that 50% of all senior outside hires quit within the first 18 months.
• For hourly workers, turnover is a major problem. 50% will leave within the first 120 days of a new job.
• 46% of new hires are considered failures by the time they reach the 18-month mark.
• Only 1 in 5 new hires are considered to be successful.

A three-year study conducted by Leadership IQ compiled the results from 5,247 hiring managers across 312 public, private, business, and healthcare organizations. 20,000 employees were collectively hired within this study period.

82% of managers reported that with hindsight, there were indications in the hiring process that an employee was not a good fit for the role. Yet a lack of confidence in their recruitment and onboarding abilities, combined with external pressures, meant warning signs were not acknowledged.

As Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ states:

“The typical job interview process fixates on ensuring that new hires are technically competent. But coachability, emotional intelligence, motivation, and temperament are much more predictive of a new hire’s success or failure. Do technical skills really matter if the employee isn’t open to improving, alienates their coworkers, lacks emotional intelligence and has the wrong personality for the job?” – Mark Murphy, Leadership IQ.

There is no second chance to make a good first impression and capture the best candidate for you and your business.The facts are blatant, but don’t worry! I’m here to guide you through not becoming another statistic.

Your key new hire checklists

Hiring the right people starts with implementing the right hiring processes. The fact that you are here reading this shows you’re looking for help with your hiring procedures. Well, you have come to the right place.

Two hiring processes stand out as the most crucial: recruiting and onboarding. If you want to get the right people for your team, you need to start with these two elements, BUT before this: PLANNING!

Process documentation: Preparation is key

How are you supposed to design the best new hire checklist if you don’t know what you wish to get from it, who it’s for, when it needs to be used, etc? Process documentation allows you to outline what you need to get from using this new hire checklist and how you can get it. It also empowers you to create a clear timeline of the process, which provides your process with clarity and actionable tasks.

You can also use these documented processes for onboarding training. Clear documentation helps new hires understand their tasks and roles sooner, reducing the common risk of confusion and aiding in becoming more productive at a faster pace.

At Process Street, we’re great advocates for process documentation. We believe that it’s the key ingredient to make your entire recruiting and onboarding experience memorable and effective. That’s why we offer Pages to everyone for free.

Pages is the official home for all your team’s knowledge and process documentation. It lives alongside your workflows to ensure you have everything you need to conduct recruiting and onboarding tasks efficiently without spending hours searching for necessary information. After you’ve done the planning, you can get into creating those recruiting and onboarding processes.

Recruitment process: Starting your new hire checklist

Click here to access our Recruitment Process!

Recruitment is an intricate process that involves attracting, shortlisting, selecting, and hiring candidates. You might not know where to start or you’re getting lost in the process. Whether you are hiring one or many employees, get ahead of the game and recruit your best team with our Recruitment Process workflow.

Our Recruitment Process workflow is designed to help you through the preparation stage, job description detailing, and interview process to ensure you’re hiring the right people.

Employee onboarding: Next up in the new hire checklist

Otherwise known as organizational socialization, effective employee onboarding gives your new employees the necessary skills, knowledge, and behaviors to become successful members of your team.

An employee onboarding checklist, like our New Hire Onboarding Process Template, is to be used after recruitment. Our Process Street employee onboarding workflow is specifically designed to avoid common onboarding pitfalls that often result in wasted time, confusion, misspent money, and employee dissatisfaction.

This employee onboarding workflow helps handle document preparation before the employee’s first day. Orientation is also included to help the new hire to get familiar with the company’s culture and policies and understand their responsibilities surrounding their position. Finally, the implementation phase of the workflow includes tasks to help the new hire become part of the team.
Click here to access our Employee Onboarding checklist!

Taking a deeper dive into the hiring process

So far we have split the hiring process into two stages: a recruitment stage and an employee onboarding stage – along with your process planning. However, to make sure this article provides you with the detail you need, we’re zooming into the hiring process even further.

The hiring process is a step-by-step process, involving identifying needs, recruitment, hiring, and employee onboarding. Although most companies will have their own hiring process – you included – there are common steps that formulate the backbone. These common steps are detailed below.

Steps have been adapted from SmartRecruiters.

Step 1: Identify the hiring need

• Diversity Hiring Process
• Performance Management
• SWOT Analysis Template
• Employment Termination Checklist
• Employee performance review
• Performance Review Template

Step 2: Devise a recruitment plan

• Financial Plan Template
• Financial Planning Process
• Recruitment Process

Step 3: Write a job description

• Job Description Template
• Customer Service Representative Job Description
• Editor Job Description Template
• Graphic Designer Job Description Template
• IT Manager Job Description Template
• Marketing Manager Job Description Template

Step 4: Advertise & recruit for the position

• AB Testing
• How to Market on Instagram – The Ultimate Guide
• New Facebook Ads Creation Checklist

Step 5: Review applications & start conducting interviews

• Customer Service Interview Process With Questions
• HR Interview Process With Questions
• Project Manager Interview Process With Questions
• Sales Interview Process With Questions
• Web Developer Interview Process With Questions

Step 6: Perform application assessment, background, & reference checks

• Employee Background Check

Step 7: Make your decision, send the job offer, & hire your new employee

• Diversity Hiring Process
• Ari Meisel’s How to Streamline the Hiring Process Guide
• Ray Dalio’s Hiring Process

Step 8: Conduct employee onboarding

• Employee Onboarding Checklist
• Accounting Onboarding Procedures
• Call Center Employee Onboarding Checklist
• Developer Onboarding at Process Street
• High-Touch Customer Onboarding for SaaS companies
• Retail Employee Onboarding Checklist

Why your hiring process matters: Real-world examples of new hire processes gone wrong

You have read the statistics, numbers detailing why a focused and functional hiring process is vital for your business. But, in case you are still not convinced, I will use this section to paint the picture clear as day. Below I have reported real-life examples of what happens when hiring processes go awry.

Hiring gone wrong: Lou Altman, Globadone

Center-stage on our hiring wall of shame, Lou Altman from Globafone is a business leader who kindly shared his hiring mistake.

Altman hired ex-military Joe (not his real name). Good on paper, but not good in practice. Joe had, “no office etiquette and poor communication skills both towards customers and within his team.”

Below are examples of Joe’s, let’s say, strange behavior:

1. Sent emails to prospects stating: “I need you to buy this stuff cuz my boss is giving me grief.”
2. Used vulgar language during staff meetings.
3. Downloaded oodles and oodles of porn.
4. Showed female coworkers inappropriate images, in the office, during working hours.

Unsurprisingly, Joe was let go.

Altman states:

“There are probably several dozen prospects that will never become clients after this interaction with him. Impressions last.” – Lou Altman, Globafone

Hiring gone wrong: Brian Scudamore, 1-800-Got-Junk

Brian Scudamore from 1-800-Got-Junk details his hiring mistake.

Scudamore was growing his company and hired a new COO to help him with day-to-day operations. Let’s refer to this COO as Lucy (again not her real name). Lucy’s credentials were on point. A highly touted, former Starbuck executive ready to take the company to the next level.

Or so Scudamore thought.

During a 5 week vacation, Scudamore returned to find his team mutinying against him.

SS Columbia Eagle style – with no guns – we are talking about complete retaliation of Scudamore’s team towards his company’s vision, stirred up by his new COO hire.

Scudamore had to let Lucy go, and focus his efforts on repairing the wreckage she had left. As Scudamore puts it:

“We dipped to a low of $75 million in revenue that year but have steadily grown ever since. This year, we’ll do $153 million.” – Brian Scudamore, 1-800-Got-Junk

Hiring gone wrong: My own experiences

Before Process Street, I worked at an environmental testing laboratory. Within a year, two employees were let go. One for sleeping at her desk. The other, for consistent errors and a poor attitude.

I experienced first hand the impact this had on internal morale, the company’s expenses, and workload management. Let me tell you, it was not a pleasant experience to spectate.

Use Process Street and our new hire checklists today

At Process Street, we are all about workflow management, helping you gain the control that you need to become successful.

Whether this is assisting you with your marketing operations, your financial procedures, or your hiring processes.We do this by providing you with state-of-the-art technology in the form of digitized checklists.

Our checklists are not like ordinary checklists. No. Process Street has superpowered checklists.

How are our checklists superpowered? Our checklists have been designed, adapted and refined to suit this modern business world. Our checklists have features such as:

• Stop tasks – to ensure task order.
• Dynamic due dates – so no deadline is missed.
• Conditional logic – creating a dynamic template that caters to your needs.
• Role assignments – to ease task delegation within your team.
• Approvals – allowing decision-makers to give the go-ahead (or rejection) on important items, in addition to providing comments as necessary.
• Automations – to automate recurring tasks and help you spend your time doing more complex tasks that add value.

Sign up for your free Process Street account today!

Start perfecting your hiring and onboarding processes today!

Your employees are your greatest assets. Hiring the right team, and taking the time needed to train and fully integrate your new hires is critical.

With the resources detailed in this article, you’re sure to begin implementing the best hiring and onboarding procedures today! Sign up for Process Street to get started.

Have you experienced a hiring horror story in your business? Are there any new hire checklists we didn’t cover? Let us know in the comments below!