6 Checklists to Perfect Your New Employee Onboarding Process | Process Street

This guide defines employee onboarding, explains why it matters, and gives you six ready-to-use employee onboarding checklists you can put to work today. Run them on their own or import them into Process Street so you can track and automate every step in Slack or Microsoft Teams, the way modern teams run employee onboarding software.

Why checklists? They are still the most reliable way to onboard new employees. A checklist makes the process repeatable, keeps anyone from skipping an important step, and gives you a clean record that the work was done. Instead of writing your own from scratch, start with one of the six below and adapt it to your business.

Reported by Dr. John Sullivan, recruiting advisor and professor of human resources, the numbers on weak onboarding are hard to ignore:

• 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, recruiting has become expensive and slow, which drains revenue and damages morale when a hire does not work out. A structured new employee onboarding process is the cheapest insurance you can buy against that.

Can’t wait? Just want the checklists? Here you go.

6 employee onboarding checklists

Why onboard new employees?

If you want to keep your best people, good onboarding is not optional. First impressions set the tone for how long someone stays and how quickly they contribute.

The research is consistent. Brandon Hall Group found that a strong onboarding process improves new hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by more than 70 percent. Other studies point the same way:

• Employees who go through a structured onboarding program are far more likely to still be with the company three years later.
• It takes 8 to 12 months for most new hires to become as proficient as their tenured colleagues, so early clarity pays off for a long time.
• A meaningful share of employees who quit early point to a poor onboarding experience as a reason they left.

Done well, onboarding increases productivity, makes the new hire happier, and saves you the cost of hiring twice for the same seat.

What is employee onboarding?

As iCIMS puts it, onboarding is the process of assimilating new hires into an organization and helping them become productive members of the team.

A complete onboarding process usually covers:

• Preparation before the start date, often called preboarding
• Introducing the tools and systems the role depends on
• Orientation to the workplace, whether that is an office or a remote setup
• Meeting the team and understanding how work flows
• Checking in on the new hire’s experience in the first weeks

Employee onboarding checklists to the rescue

The statistics look grim, but the fix is refreshingly simple. Across HR teams, the most common way to run a consistent employee onboarding process is to build a checklist and follow it every single time. It removes guesswork, protects against skipped steps, and gives every new hire the same complete experience.

Process Street has the templates ready for you to use.

Scroll through the six onboarding checklists below and grab whichever fits the role you are hiring for.

Our 6 new employee onboarding process templates

General Employee Onboarding Checklist

With the sheer variety of jobs and professions out there, no single checklist can cover every role, so start here with the ultimate general employee onboarding checklist.

It is not job-specific, but it covers everything you can think of, and plenty you might forget, to bring a new hire up to speed on the company. Use it as is or adjust it to your needs and start improving the way employees perform their duties before day one even arrives.

Click here to get the general employee onboarding checklist.

Call Center Employee Onboarding Checklist

Call centers are fast paced environments that sell and support complex products. Getting agents up to speed quickly improves retention and cuts the stress and anxiety a new hire feels in week one.

Think about what that does for your customer satisfaction and for agent productivity and happiness.

Our call center employee onboarding checklist starts on the day you hire a new agent and makes sure nothing slips, so your onboarding runs smoothly, your people feel supported, and your customers stay taken care of.

Click here to get the call center onboarding checklist.

Retail Employee Onboarding Checklist

Retail onboarding often happens in groups, through training sessions or remotely, through videos. These orientation sessions usually cover the brand, the values of the company, and the story of how it started.

You have built a great retail business and you need people who are just as great to help it succeed. Think back to your own first days working for someone else. Can you trace the steps of your onboarding? What would you have wanted more of? Most people wish they had a little more training and attention so they felt valuable and prepared.

This is your chance to give new hires the retail employee onboarding checklist of their dreams. It makes sure your team is informed, trained, and left with a smile, which matters a lot when they are the ones in direct contact with your customers.

Click here to get the retail onboarding checklist.

Restaurant Employee Onboarding Checklist

Hiring for your restaurant is a lot like producing an ad for it. When you create a campaign, you bring in a whole team to figure out the best way to win customers over and prove your restaurant is the place to be.

A new hire is there to prove that promise is true. They interact with customers, shape the whole experience, and stay with your guests from the first greeting to the last goodbye.

Given how much time, money, and energy go into attracting the right people, it only makes sense to invest the same attention in onboarding them well.

Use the restaurant employee onboarding checklist every time you bring on a new restaurant worker to cover the basics and make sure they are happy, prepared, and ready to make your restaurant one people come back to.

Click here to get the restaurant onboarding checklist.

Developer Onboarding Checklist for Startups

Developers are often thrown in at the deep end when they join a new company, expected to teach themselves the parts of the codebase and architecture they do not yet know. That works for some people, but it can be stressful enough to make a new hire want to quit.

The cost of replacing a developer is steep once you factor in half-finished projects, ramp-up time, and the constant demand for strong engineers. That is why we built a developer onboarding checklist you can run every time an engineer joins the team.

Prepare them for what is coming, make them feel welcome on day one, and stay on top of their progress over the following weeks with this simple developer onboarding checklist.

Click here to get the developer onboarding checklist.

Salesperson Onboarding Checklist for Startups

Whether you sell B2B or B2C, you want your sales team performing at the highest standard. But people do not arrive knowing everything, and selling only gets more complex as your product and market evolve.

It is not just the job specifics either. Every company has its own tools, office layout, and unwritten rules. All of it is second nature to you and completely new to your hire. That is a lot to absorb in the first week, and nobody remembers every step on their own.

That is exactly why Process Street built this salesperson onboarding checklist for startups. It guides you from the moment a new rep is hired through their first day, week, and month, including the details that are easy to forget, like walking them through the company handbook.

Click here to get the salesperson onboarding checklist.

Process Street for employee onboarding

Process Street is a Compliance Operations Platform that turns your onboarding SOPs into automated, trackable workflows, so every new hire gets the same complete experience no matter who runs the process.

Document each onboarding procedure once, run it as a workflow with clear owners and due dates, and let built-in AI flag missed steps and stalled tasks before they become a problem. Workflow automation and approvals handle the busywork, while your HR and ops teams keep a live record that the right steps happened for every employee.

Want a checklist for a role we have not covered yet? Build your own in minutes, it is easier than you think.