The first week decides a lot about a new job, and most of what goes wrong is boring stuff: no working email, no schedule, no idea who to ask. This free onboarding checklist template covers Day 1 through Day 90 with 25 steps, an equipment and access table with named owners and due dates, and a first-week schedule you can copy today. The full HR Ops Kit packs it together with a fill-in employee handbook and 5 form PDFs, linked at the bottom.
How to use this page: copy the checklist into whatever you already track in, then put a name and a date next to every item. The rule that keeps the list honest: every item has one owner and one due date, or it does not happen. Keep the finished sheet in the employee's personnel record.
This is not legal advice. Onboarding involves documents and records that state law treats differently: payroll forms, required notices, file retention. The templates here are generic, so have a qualified lawyer or advisor review anything you plan to file or hand out as policy.
25 steps across five phases. Tick the box when done, write the date next to it, and file the sheet when the 90 days close out.
The first month is for learning. Your job as the manager is to get expectations in writing, hand over one small deliverable, and review it fast. A new hire who ends month one knowing what good work looks like is on track. One who ends it still guessing will keep guessing, and the guessing shows up in their output long before it shows up in a review.
Month two is for doing. Routine tasks should now run without you in the room. Close whatever the 30-day review flagged, finish compliance training, and put the person in front of a real customer or client so they see where their work actually lands. This is also the window where quiet problems (unclear priorities, a tool they never learned) either get fixed or calcify.
Month three is for ownership. Core duties run end to end, next-quarter goals get written down, and both sides say out loud whether the fit works. The 90-day review is where onboarding either ends or gets extended; without that conversation, a rough start just quietly becomes the permanent arrangement.
Write it down at every phase. A dated checklist in a file answers "was that ever done"; a memory of a hallway chat answers nothing. The form matters less than the names and dates on it, which is what makes the reviews at 30, 60, and 90 days take an hour instead of an afternoon.
Logins and hardware cause most Day 1 friction. Assign each item before the start date so nobody spends their first morning waiting on IT.
| Item | Owner | Due |
|---|---|---|
| Desk, keys, badge | Office manager | Day 1, before start |
| Laptop, set up and tested | IT or office manager | Day 1 |
| Email account | IT | Day 1 |
| Payroll and timesheet profile | Owner or bookkeeper | Day 1 |
| Role-specific tool accounts | Direct manager | Day 2 |
| Signed handbook acknowledgment | HR or owner | Back by end of Week 1 |
| Onboarding buddy assigned | Direct manager | Week 1 |
| Building and system access levels | IT | Week 1 |
A written schedule stops the "so what do I do now" loop. Adjust the blocks to your hours; the shape is what matters.
| Day | Morning | Afternoon |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Welcome, workplace tour, paperwork, badge | Equipment setup, accounts tested |
| Tuesday | Role expectations meeting | Tool training, part 1 |
| Wednesday | Policies walkthrough (hours, leave, conduct) | Shadow a teammate on one real process |
| Thursday | First small task assigned | Tool training, part 2, questions |
| Friday | First task finished and reviewed | End-of-week check-in, week-2 plan |
Paper first, digital later. A printed checklist on the manager's desk gets ticked; a form buried in a tab list gets forgotten, and at small scale the printout also becomes the personnel record copy you were going to file anyway. Move to digital once you have remote hires or more than a handful of employees, because a spreadsheet can be shared and a paper sheet cannot. Both fail the same way when nobody owns the list, so name one owner and check progress weekly whichever format you pick.
When someone leaves instead of starts, the employee offboarding checklist covers access revocation, the handover doc, and the last-day timeline.
Full HR Ops Kit - fill-in handbook + 5 form PDFs, 93 placeholder fields →one-time · PDF + editable text file · instant download · templates only, not legal advice