Employee onboarding checklist for businesses

Hiring a new employee involves a certain level of risk for any business — risk that the employee may not be a good fit for the role or company, risk that the employee might learn company secrets and leave for a competitor, risk that they may be lying about who they are to begin with in order to engage in some sort of fraud. 

But just because risk is a part of the hiring process doesn’t mean that you can’t take steps to mitigate or minimize it. Implementing a comprehensive, risk-based employee onboarding process is one way that you can control for some of these risks.

Below, we take a closer look at what employee onboarding is, the benefits that it offers both employers and employees, and the steps that are usually involved. We also provide a sample employee onboarding checklist that you can tailor to your organization’s specific needs, discuss the paperwork typically involved in onboarding new employees, and offer some best practices to help you as you design your own processes. 

What is employee onboarding?

Employee onboarding is a collection of processes that takes place when a new hire joins an organization — essentially, it’s everything necessary to integrate the employee into the business. It includes:

• The collection and completion of important paperwork

• Employee orientation and training

• Workforce authentication

• Establishing the employee on the company’s payroll

• And more

What are the employee onboarding process steps?

Employee onboarding can vary substantially from company to company, depending on factors like an organization’s size and maturity, as well as the specific laws, regulations, risks, and employee expectations a given industry faces. 

That being said, it typically consists of three employee onboarding process steps:

Pre-onboarding

Pre-onboarding, or preboarding, is everything that happens between the moment your new hire accepts their job offer and their first day on the job with your company. Depending on your policies and the agreement you made with the new hire, this could be as short as a few days or it could extend to a month or more, but it usually falls somewhere in the two- to four-week range.

With this in mind, pre-onboarding typically includes a number of steps that make up the Know Your Employee (KYE) process:

• Employee identity verification: Confirm the new hire’s identity via government ID verification, database verification, document verification, selfie verification, or other methods.

• Employment authorization verification: Confirm that the new hire is authorized to work in the United States, via a Form I-9.

• Employee background checks (if necessary): Request permission from the new hire to perform a background check, if any are necessary.

  • Background checks may include:

    • Criminal background checks

    • Employment history verification

    • Education and degree verification

    • Professional license verification

    • Credit checks

    • Reference checks

    • Motor vehicle reports (i.e., driving history checks)

    • Drug screening

    • and more

• Completion of paperwork: Provide the new hire with paperwork to complete prior to their start date, which may include:

  • Acknowledgment of receipt for employee handbook

  • Emergency contact forms

  • Form I-9 employment authorization verification (previously mentioned)

  • Permission to conduct background checks (previously mentioned)

  • Form W-4 (federal income tax withholding)

  • State and local income tax withholding forms, if necessary

  • Direct deposit authorization form (for payroll)

  • Employment contracts

  • Non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and non-compete agreement

  • Benefits enrollment forms (health insurance, retirement contributions, etc.)

• Equipment requests for the new hire: Submit internal requests to procure equipment necessary for the new hire to perform the duties of their role, which may include a:

  • Computer/laptop

  • Smartphone

  • Security badge or ID

  • Office Key

It can also be a good idea to use the pre-onboarding phase to begin making the rest of your team or organization aware of the new hire. You can achieve this via a “new hire” announcement email, by publishing an employee profile on your website, etc. 

Onboarding

Onboarding is what happens when a new hire officially starts working in their new role within your organization. It includes workforce authentication, orientation, and role-specific training, and can take place digitally (for remote positions) or on-site (for in-person or hybrid positions). As such, onboarding will usually entail:

• Workforce authentication: Getting the employee set up within any internal systems they require access to, such as email, data, or file systems, and digital tools. You need to provide the employee with:

  • Usernames

  • Passwords

  • Security questions

  • Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

  • Single Sign-On (SSO)

• Orientation: Usually a 1-2 day period where the employee becomes acquainted with the company

  • Introduce the new hire to their manager and direct coworkers

  • Review key sections of the company handbook, including questions about company values and mission

  • Review important company policies such as those related to data and privacy, information security, etc.

  • Review benefits and answer any questions the new hire may have

  • Provide a tour of the office, if this is an in-person role

  • Collect any hiring forms not yet completed by the new hire

• Role-specific training: Teaching the new hire how to complete the duties assigned to their role, which may include:

  • Step-by-step walkthroughs of specific tasks

  • Demonstrations for using specific tools or software

  • Reviewing safety protocols 

  • Reviewing compliance training and materials

Ongoing maintenance

Once a new hire has officially been onboarded, it’s important to ensure that you are continuing to manage any potential risk that your employee may pose to your business. This ongoing maintenance should ultimately continue for the entire time that the new hire is employed by your company. This final phase of the employee onboarding process will include things like:

• Record-keeping: Routinely updating the employee’s record for accuracy, including changes to:

  • Name (for example, from marriage, divorce, etc.)

  • Contact information (email, phone number)

  • Address 

  • Banking details (for direct deposit)

• Reverification: Periodically reverifying the employee’s identity, especially at high-risk moments such as when the employee attempts to:

  • Access or download sensitive files or data

  • Initiate a large purchase, transfer, or other transaction

  • Log into company systems from an unrecognized device

  • Log into company systems from a suspicious IP address or geographical location

  • Change personal details, such as their direct deposit or benefits information

• Worforce identity and access management (IAM) hygiene: Follow best practices to ensure your data and systems are protected from inappropriate access, which may include:

  • Forcing employees to periodically change or update passwords

  • Implementing two-factor authentication if it is not already in place

  • Removing access to sensitive systems for accounts that no longer exist or that no longer need access

  • Implementing controls for privileged access management

  • Auditing and monitoring access logs

What are the benefits of employee onboarding?

Employers can realize a number of benefits of employee onboarding by implementing a thoughtful and comprehensive process for new hires, including:

Less turnover

Effective onboarding increases the likelihood that a new hire will find success in their role, potentially leading to lower turnover and, as a result, fewer hiring costs. One study found that 69 percent of new hires who had an “exceptional onboarding experience” are likely to stay with the company for at least three years.

You can use our onboarding checklist examples above to guide your own process steps.

Decreased compliance risk

Multiple steps of the pre-onboarding process — including identity verification, employment authorization verification, and background checks — make it easier for a company to comply with various laws and regulations that impact hiring.

Reductions in other fraud risk

Those same pre-onboarding steps can also help to surface risk signals about a new hire that can aid you in reducing the risk of other types of fraud, such as employment identity theft, credential fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, and more.

Employee onboarding checklist template for businesses

Once you’ve designed an employee onboarding process for your business, a checklist can help you ensure that the process is always followed and that important steps are not overlooked. 

While your onboarding checklist should be informed by the realities faced by your business — including the industry you operate within, the regulations you must comply with, the types of fraud you are exposed to, and your organization’s risk tolerance — this employee onboarding checklist template is a great place to start. Please note: This checklist template is only an example of onboarding tasks that your business may consider during each onboarding phase. This template may look different from business to business depending on your unique needs.

New hire paperwork checklist

As noted above, the process of hiring a new employee typically involves a lot of paperwork, which is usually completed during the pre-onboarding phase. Here’s a quick new hire paperwork checklist of the forms your employee will need to complete:

• Form I-9 

• Form W-4

• State and local tax withholding forms

• Direct deposit authorization

• Employment contract

• NDA and non-compete agreement

• Emergency contact forms

• Request for permission to conduct background checks

• Benefits enrollment forms

And here’s a list of paperwork that you should be prepared to provide to your new employees, which does not necessarily need to be completed but which the employee should have:

• Offer letter

• Official job description

• Employee handbook

• Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplace Notice

• Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) Notice

• Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Notice

• State and local notices (may include notices about state disability insurance, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, state-run retirement programs, discrimination and harassment, wage and hour laws, and more)

Onboarding best practices checklist 

Designing and implementing an employee onboarding process can be difficult, especially if you don’t currently have one in place. The onboarding best practices checklist below can help you frame your thinking about what employee onboarding should look like for your business. 

Take a risk-based approach

One of the main benefits of having an employee onboarding process is that it can help businesses minimize their exposure to employment-related risks. 

As such, it’s important to identify the risks your business is exposed to when hiring new employees and use those risks to inform your onboarding strategy. We call this taking a risk-based approach, which may consider:

• Fraud risk

• Compliance risk

• Privacy and security risk

• Costs (such as those related to turnover)

• And more

Don’t overlook the value of pre-onboarding

While some businesses condense the entire onboarding process down into a single phase, this isn’t always a good idea. After all, activities that are typically performed during pre-onboarding offer a number of benefits:

• Collecting the required paperwork up front — such as tax forms, benefits enrollment forms, company policies, employee handbooks, and more — means that your new hire can hit the ground running on their first day with more impactful training.

• Providing new hires with required notices decreases compliance risks that could lead to costly legal and regulatory fines.

• Performing identity verification and background checks can surface red flags or details about a new hire — such as a criminal record, driving infractions, or lies about education and employment history — that help you achieve a better understanding of whether or not you should actually hire them.

Even if you don’t spike pre-onboarding out into its own phase, it’s important that the activities associated with it are still carried out. 

Customize the process by role and department

Depending on the size and complexity of your business, as well as the industries and jurisdictions you operate within, you may need to tailor your onboarding processes depending on which roles or departments you are hiring for. Here again, it’s important to consider role- or department-specific risks and how onboarding may be able to help you control for these risks. 

It isn’t set in stone

Like so many other processes you implement within your business, your employee onboarding process isn’t permanent. It can — and should — change and evolve as your business needs change and evolve, and as you learn more by onboarding real hires. With this in mind, consider revisiting your strategy every year or so to evaluate it and determine if it is still meeting your business needs or if changes and updates have become necessary. 

How is an onboarding checklist helpful for legal compliance?

A number of laws and regulations can all impact your business’s hiring process, and it’s important that you don’t overlook anything critical — like employment authorization verification or employment identity verification — that could land your organization in hot water. A checklist can help you cross your t’s and dot your i’s to ensure that you are fully compliant with all of the legal requirements your business is subject to during hiring. 

Get employee onboarding right with Persona

Employee onboarding can involve a lot of different steps, each of which takes time, effort, and resources to complete. But the benefits of having an onboarding process far outweigh those costs — and with the right tools in place, it doesn’t need to be such a heavy lift. 

Persona’s flexible suite of identity tools can support the employee onboarding process during every phase with:

• Identity verification: Leverage government ID verification, database verification, selfie verification, and other methods to confirm the identity of your applicants and hires

• Employment authorization verification: Collect and verify a wide variety of ID types necessary to confirm a hire’s legal right to work in the United States, including driver’s licenses, passports, state IDs, and more, using Persona’s document verification solution

• Background checks: Perform criminal history background checks and driving record checks and additional reports (like adverse media screenings, politically exposed persons checks, sanctions list screenings, and watchlist screenings) to get a fuller picture of your new hire’s risk profile

• Reverification: Reverify your employee’s identity at high-risk moments, such as when they log into company systems using an unrecognized device, to protect your business from account takeover (ATO) fraud and other risks

And because Persona bundles together IDV and background check capabilities into a single, integrated platform, that means you only have to worry about one procurement process, one contract, one integration, and one implementation vs. cobbling together multiple solutions on your own. 

Ready to learn more about how Persona can help you get employee onboarding right? Get started today with a free account, or contact us for a demo to see how it all works.