After onboarding new employees across companies and disciplines, having been onboarded, and working to improve onboarding practices at nearly every company I’ve worked at, I’ve stumbled to the belief that there is a nearly-algorithmic process can lead to an ideal—or at least much more acceptable—onboarding experience. 

Following this algorithm will take work, but it leads step-by-step to a complete, detailed onboarding program.  Contrast it with other articles that suggest you “ensure a positive first day reception” or “create a journey that’s intuitive and easy“.  Plenty of those articles give some broad guidelines.  Broad guidelines can be useful; specific actionable steps are much more so.¹

I recommend following these steps in the order presented, at least the first time².  As you onboard more new employees, you’ll learn things that will help you refine your onboarding process.  You should incorporate those things into your onboarding process³.  If you follow this algorithm and realize there are steps that you wish you had taken, or if you wish the steps had been ordered differently, I’d like to know!

I believe this algorithm can be successfully applied in a wide range of jobs and industries.  It’s likely less helpful in very standardized roles for which detailed onboarding and training already exist—but if that’s your situation, you’re probably not reading this.

Without any further introduction, here is the algorithm, with some brief explanation of each step.

Step 1: Gather your current onboarding process and materials

If anything exists now, find it.  There are two reasons for doing so.  First, it feels good to “get started” and to “do something”.  Second, having the current onboarding steps together will be useful later for making sure you haven’t missed anything important.  If nothing exists, and you’re working completely from scratch, that’s fine too!

Gather up as much as you can.  Documents, emails that get sent to the new hire, links to Slack conversations that always seem to happen when someone new starts, wiki pages, etc.

Step 2: Define your goals (or purpose statement) for your onboarding process

This could sound something like “The purpose of onboarding in the Software Division is to help new employees understand Projects L, M, and N, to establish relationships with our Hardware Division and Testing Division, and to be able to produce production-quality software within three weeks of their start date.”  Or it might be a bit more like GIS technician onboarding, and sound like “Our goals are for us to evaluate the progress of our GIS technicians toward competency in our custom toolset, our field hardware, and industry knowledge; to provide a standardized curriculum for learning; and for all technicians to be fully qualified within six months.”  Don’t copy one of these—it’s almost certainly wrong for your situation.  Think through what your actual goals are, and decide the best way to capture them on paper.  Don’t spend too much time wordsmithing.  You can always come back and improve it later.

Step 3: Create a blank checklist. Put the goals (or purpose statement) you just defined at the top.

This checklist is the core output or “result” the algorithm will produce.  You’ll use a copy of the checklist for each employee that onboards.  It does not matter what tool you use for this⁴.  I like a Google Sheet or an online Excel sheet.  If you prefer Trello, Miro, a Word doc, a Jira project⁵, or Asana, any of those are fine.  The checklist will contain tasks for the new employee and for individuals other than the new employee.  Keep that in mind when selecting a tool.

Yes, it’s going to start blank, except for the goals/purpose.  Don’t worry about it.  We’re going to add a lot to it in the next few steps.If your current onboarding process is all in a single place, and is easy to edit, you can start with that.((In my experience, it probably isn’t.  There’s that Word doc with a bunch of steps that’s a bit outdated, and that wiki page with a bunch of other steps, and that email full of notes that Bob needs to email to the new hire so they know how to do that other thing, and that one Slack message with the corrections to the wiki page…))

I plan to create a Google Sheet template, based on the Manager Tools example, with improvements I’ve stumbled upon at several companies, that you can use.  It’s not ready yet.

Step 4: Add all of the tasks in your current onboarding process and materials to your checklist

Even if you don’t agree with a step, or plan to change it, just add it for now.  Feel free to mark steps that you don’t like, that you plan to expand on, or that don’t make sense anymore.  It’s okay to link to a procedure documented somewhere (e.g., on the intranet or in a Google Doc), but the task must have a line item on the checklist.

Once you finish this step, you’ll have your current process all in one place.

Step 5: Define the guidelines and principles for creating a new employee’s first day task / first project

The difficulty of this step varies pretty wildly depending on the job and the industry.  One of the hardest parts about getting started in a new role is having something productive to do.  If the role you’re creating onboarding materials for does not have a defined training plan⁶ you’ll instead need to create guidelines for what a new employee’s first day task or first project will be.  If you’re hiring software engineers and want them to commit code on Day 1, you’ll need to have a task picked out ahead of time that’s small enough to complete.  If you’re hiring truck drivers and they need to understand your procedures for refueling and the repair shop, you might design a Day 1 task that involves fueling up a truck and driving it to the shop while you ride along.

If you’ll need to come up with a different first day task for each employee, add “Create Day 1 Task” to the checklist as something to do prior to the employee’s start.

If the first day tasks are always the same, add those tasks to the checklist.

Document the guidelines and principles somewhere easily discoverable from within the checklist.  For example, if you’re using a spreadsheet, put it on a tab of the spreadsheet.

Step 6: Add access to corporate accounts and tools to the checklist

Most jobs require access to corporate accounts and tools of some sort.  Email accounts, passwords, key cards, GitHub teams, Slack, corporate credit cards—whatever an employee in this role will need.

For each of these accounts and tools, add an item to the checklist to grant access, prior to the employee’s start date if possible.  Each account / tool should be a stand-alone checklist item.  Employees feel much more welcome when they start and they don’t have to spend several days getting access to everything they need.

Step 7: Add access to team accounts and tools to the checklist

Individual teams or departments often use tools that the rest of the company doesn’t use.  A team of graphic designers might use Adobe’s tools or Figma.  Accountants might be issued stylish green eye shades and printing desk calculators.  Those accounts and tools are just as important as the corporate accounts when it comes to productivity.

For each of these accounts and tools, add an item to the checklist to grant access, prior to the employee’s start date if possible.  Each account / tool should be a stand-alone checklist item.

Step 8: Add scheduling one-on-ones to the checklist

If you’re a manager, and you don’t do one-on-ones, you should. Add a task to brief the new hire on one-on-ones early in their onboarding. Add another task immediately following the briefing to schedule the one-on-one series.

Step 9: Add mandatory corporate trainings to the checklist, as late in the process as possible

Most companies have at least some mandatory training.  Check with HR (and other departments, if applicable) to identify each training, its approximate duration, and how long an employee has to complete it.  Add each training to the checklist.  Each training should be a stand-alone checklist item.

Employees are often encouraged to “get it out of the way early”, but this can slow down onboarding.  Mandatory corporate training is often low-value and impedes developing relationships with new colleagues.  Even in the best situations, it’s not very exciting.  If HR tells you that new employees must complete their compliance training within four weeks, put a four week deadline on that training. ((On the flip side, if you work for a defense contractor and employees must complete International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) training before joining the project team, give that a much tighter deadline!))

Step 10: Add mandatory corporate paperwork to the checklist, as late in the process as possible

There is certainly paperwork your company requires.  In the U.S., this includes employment eligibility and tax paperwork.  It probably also includes retirement accounts, health insurance, and paperwork for other benefits.  Some of these have required deadlines.  As in the above step, check with HR and assign a deadline as late in the process as possible⁷.  Add each individual piece of paperwork to the checklist as a standalone checklist item.

The wrinkle here is that new employees often want to get their paperwork filled out.  They want to receive their benefits!  If it is possible, provide the paperwork to the employee ahead of their start date.  If you’re able to provide the paperwork ahead of their start date, add a task to the checklist with a due date prior to the employee’s start date to remind you to do so.⁸

Step 11: Interview recent new hires about their onboarding experience

Recent new hires have valuable perspective, especially if they have taken notes on their first few weeks.  They have not completely forgotten the experience of being new.  To get access to that valuable perspective and make things better, interview your most recent new hires.((Recency is important.  If the “new guy” got hired four years ago, he’s not recent any more.  More than six months is probably too long; more than a full year is right out.))

Here are some useful questions:

1. Did you feel welcome?  Why or why not?
2. What worked well?
3. What would have made your first day / week / month better?  How so?
4. What do you still feel like you don’t know?
5. What was the best thing about your first day / week /month?
6. What things didn’t go well?

When interviewing, feel free to probe for more detail about anything interesting the recent new hire shares.  Express gratitude for any feedback they give.  Don’t express anger if they tell you their onboarding experience was rough.  Doing so will make them less likely to give you forthright input in the future⁹.  Honest feedback on the onboarding experience is a gift; it provides an opportunity to improve.

After you have completed your interviews, review the answers.  Identify areas for improvement.  If any improvements can be made with specific onboarding tasks (e.g., ask for sizing information to make sure their uniform will fit before ordering their uniform and embroidering their name on it), add those tasks to the checklist.

One suggestion for an improvement is to send an email about a week before the first day, containing everything the new employee will need to know to be prepared for their first day. Dress code, where to park, that their email / Slack password will be coming in the mail with their laptop—whatever is needed to make them feel comfortable and in control coming into Day One. Add sending that email to the checklist (and consider creating a template for it!).

Step 12: Create materials for a sponsor / buddy / guide

In most roles, it’s helpful for a new employee to spend their first 15 minutes on the job being given a stack of paperwork, a brief tour of the facility, a sticky note with their password, a gesture in the direction of their desk/station, and to be left alone with a quick “good luck!”

Just kidding.  That’s a terrible feeling.  And it’s terrible for retention.

In most roles, it’s helpful for a new employee to be paired up with a sponsor, or onboarding buddy, or guide.  Pick whatever term best suits your culture, but assigning someone to each new employee to help them come up to speed (and letting both the sponsor and the new employee know!) is well worth the time.

If you’re asking “what would a sponsor do?”, well, that’s what you get to define here.  In this step, you are defining specific expectations of the sponsor.  Depending on the role and the industry, there might be a lot to explain.  If you’re onboarding engineers at a company that makes agricultural equipment, you’ll need to explain how the equipment is used and what need it fills for farmers.  If you’re onboarding warehouse workers, you’ll need to explain how material flows through your warehouse and any special handling or safety procedures.

Start with the broad outlines of what you want the sponsor to do (e.g., explain the industry, explain how our team’s output is used in the finished product, explain the departments we interact, help them understand why we play Bagel Toss every Thursday before the staff meeting).

Once you have the broad outlines, you’ll create at least two types of materials.  First, you’ll create tasks on the onboarding checklist.  If the new employee needs to be prepared for Bagel Toss before their first Thursday staff meeting, create a “Prepare the new employee for Bagel Toss” task that’s due by the new employee’s first Wednesday, assigned to the sponsor.  Second, you’ll create supplemental outlines, documents, or other reference materials.  If the new employee needs to get up to speed on an unfamiliar industry, having the outlines of trainings, FAQs, or diagrams for the sponsor to use might help.¹⁰ You do not need to create highly polished reference materials at this time.

Start by creating outlines or documenting high-level expectations.  Let sponsors use their experience and ingenuity to expand them over time.The expectations of a sponsor will vary across roles.  A sponsor for a classroom teacher would need to provide different information at different times than a sponsor for a school receptionist.  Take your time to think through what a sponsor for a particular role will do.

Step 13: Cross check your list of accounts and tools against your Day 1 Task or First Project for the new employee

The purpose of this step is to ensure that you haven’t left accounts or tools out of your onboarding checklist.  Walk through a Day 1 Task or First Project and write down every account or tool that the employee will need.  It might sound a bit like “They’ll clone the repository from GitHub (ah, add them to the Developers team in GitHub!), then run the unit tests (oh! they’ll need to have access to our private Docker image repository), make their change (Jira ticket, add them to Jira!)…”.  When you’re done, make sure every account or tool you identified is on the onboarding checklist.

As an extra layer of assurance, you could ask someone on your team to go through the same exercise independently.

This step is separated enough in time from the original step of creating that list of accounts and tools that you may have remembered some additional items that need to be added besides what you discovered during the cross-check.  That’s great!  Add them to the list, too.

Step 14: Gather up any existing “basic training” for the role

There is probably some existing set of “basic training” that exists.  You’ve probably already found some of it when gathering current onboarding materials, listing the mandatory corporate trainings or working on sponsor expectations.  Think broader than that here.  There will be training on the company, on tooling that’s used, job-specific training, industry training.  Your new software engineers might need Kubernetes training.  Your new warehouse employees might need to be trained on your specific forklift procedures.  Your new dental hygienist might need to be trained on your office’s specific X-ray machines. 

Gathering up anything that exists means you can re-use it, or know what’s missing and create it (that’s the next step!), or know what exists but isn’t good and needs to be revised.

Step 15: Create any additional “basic training” that you need

In previous steps you have gathered up any existing “basic training” for the role, identified some things that a sponsor should cover, and gotten a pretty crisp idea of what new folks in this role will need to know and do.  Figuring out where the gaps are—what other things the new employee needs to become productive—should be pretty straightforward. 

If basic training is missing from what already exists (or is bad enough that it needs to be fixed), this is the time to create it.  You can start with outlines or short documents that depend on more experienced employees delivering the training.  Part of onboarding can be for the person delivering the training to improve it.  Start with at least a skeleton for each training.  It’s better to have something that says “Cash Register Training:  (1) making a sale (2) doing a refund (3) closing out” than to have nothing at all.  That something can be improved over time.

It might take you some time to create your basic training.  Don’t aim for perfection in your first go-round.  Aim for good enough, and better than what exists.  Fill in the most important gaps first.

Step 16: Identify the people inside your department that the new hire needs to meet. Add meetings with those people to the checklist.

New employees start without knowing any of the social landscape of the organization.  It’s terribly difficult for them to understand who has the information they need, or who needs to sign off on work.  Helping your new employee meet people within the department and understand what those people do will help them be more productive faster.

People to meet might include the employee’s team, managers across the department, key individual contributors, executives, support staff, etc.Identify who they need to meet inside the department, and add those meetings to the checklist.  Give reasonable due dates, but those meetings should happen soon after the employee starts. 

Step 17: Identify the people outside your department that people inside your department need to meet. Add meetings with those people to the checklist.

There are often individuals outside your department that are important for your new employee to know.  They could be people that your employee will work with regularly, or control key parts of a process, or understand how work flows through the organization, or are simply individuals that are important in internal politics and therefore good to have relationships with.

Identify who they need to meet outside the department, and add requesting those meetings to the checklist, assigned to the new employee.  Set due dates based on the importance of that person to your new employee’s effectiveness.  Keep the due dates within about 90 days of the new employee’s start date—it is much easier to request a “meet and greet” meeting when you’re new than after you’ve been around for half a year.

Step 18: (BONUS!) Figure out how you want to change the culture of your organization, and how you can drive that with your onboarding.

Every person you add to your organization affects its culture.  The interview process can help you select a new hire that will help improve your organization’s culture, whether that is going from bad to good, good to great, or simply making it slightly better. 

It’s easy to talk about culture as a one-dimensional scale from bad to good, or zero to ten.  Culture is not so linear.  There are multiple dimensions to consider, some of which are common (e.g., speed, quality, innovation) and some of which may be unique to your organization.

Onboarding is a mechanism for culture change.  It’s a new hire’s first experience with your culture, so the impression you make on them is likely to stay with them.  It’s also a project that people already in the organization are part of.  You can structure onboarding in creative ways to influence people already part of the organization.

As a simple example, assume your organization struggles with collaboration.  Perhaps individual, point-to-point communication is preferred, and that leads to the “game of telephone” effect, producing lack of clarity, lack of alignment, and poor results.  Part of onboarding could be holding several meetings in which multiple people (who need to collaborate more day-to-day) jointly explain priorities or projects to the new hire.  The new hire will expect more collaboration, and old-timers will get some experience in collaboration.  It’s not a complete fix, but it is a nudge in the right direction on a potentially large issue.

Step 19: Create a central START HERE for onboarding

You’re almost to the end!  You’ve created a checklist of tasks, identified helpful materials, and created materials that were missing.  Great work!

Make sure they can be found.  All of them.  Including that document that only exists as an email draft right now.

Making sure they can be found looks like a central START HERE location for all things onboarding.  Use the system that makes the most sense for your business (your wiki, your Google Drive, your intranet, etc.).  Communication tools like Slack or Outlook are probably not the right place—they make it much harder to find things and much easier to inadvertently limit access to materials.

Your central START HERE location should have a clearly identified starting point (e.g., a template for new onboarding checklists) and contain all the materials you will need.  Except in rare circumstances, this does not mean links; this means the actual documents, templates, etc.((If you use a third-party tool for some of the materials or your checklist, consider having a picture/PDF/export of those materials.  That will mean you can re-create it more easily if you ever lose access or the company providing the tool disappears.))  If you send a “welcome” email two days before your new hire shows up, the template for that email should exist in your onboarding START HERE location.

This isn’t just for you—although it is much easier to have a central location than having to find your previous “welcome” email in your sent folder.  This is for the entire organization’s benefit.  If you’re on vacation the next time someone is starting¹¹, or if you’ve been promoted (congrats!) or moved to a different department (good luck!), or you’re trying to prepare a direct report to be a hiring manager someday, or any of a dozen other reasons other folks might need to be able to carry out onboarding without you being hands-on with the process, having your onboarding process all in a central location (that’s not just on your computer) is helpful. 

Step 20: Test and improve your onboarding every time an employee starts

The next time an employee starts, use that as an opportunity to test your onboarding experience.  Specifically ask the new employee to help make improvements.  Every time they need access, information, connections, relationships, paperwork, equipment, or anything else, they need to inform you (personally or through their sponsor).  It could be that things are missing from the checklist—or possibly timing just needs to be adjusted. 

In addition to adding or adjusting items, schedule time to get regular feedback about the process.  If there are parts of the onboarding process that feel clunky, badly timed, useless, or off-putting, you should know.  You should also know if there are parts that are helpful, attractive, and empowering. 

Add scheduling regular feedback sessions to the onboarding checklist.  Make it the responsibility of the new employee—that helps them get used to scheduling meetings with you, so that doing so is less scary later on.

Policies and procedures in the rest of the company are likely to change over time.  The ideal time to check for changes and update the onboarding checklist is before an employee starts.  So for each department that has an effect on your employee’s onboarding experience, add a task to the checklist, before the employee starts, to check for updates to their processes, forms, and procedures.  A few departments to consider (this may not be the right list for your company) are HR, IT, and facilities. ¹²

Step 21: Hot wash the whole experience, improve it, and repeat

And now you’ve gotten through it!  You’ve created an entire onboarding process that covers everything you need to the best of your current knowledge.  Congratulations!  Without exaggeration, your onboarding process, by virtue of existing as a process, puts your organization in the top 10% for onboarding.

Now you can print it all out, put it in a binder, put the binder on the shelf, and forget all about it until your next new hire.

Please don’t believe that last sentence.  All this work you’ve done is far too value to put it on a shelf.If you haven’t already, add 30, 60, 90, and 180 day check-ins with your new hire to the checklist.  Make sure, in addition to everything else you might discuss, to talk about the onboarding process (as a process):  what’s working, what’s not, and what can be better.

Add a “hot wash” or “retrospective” to the checklist as well.  The right time to do this depends on your business.  For onboarding a new software engineer, I’d do 45 days and 90 days.  For a grocery store stock clerk, 14 days and 30 days would probably be better.  The “hot wash” should include you, the new employee, the sponsor, and anyone else who is more than tangentially involved in the onboarding process.  Yes, that could be a lot of people, and that’s okay—this is important.  Find out what worked and what didn’t; what was ready in time and what caused friction; what everyone liked and what everyone disliked.

Take all the information you gather, reflect on it, and use it to update your onboarding process.

And again, congratulations:  you have taken another big step!  You have gone from having a process for creating onboarding projects (which is great!), to having a self-improving onboarding program (even better!). 

In Conclusion…

Whew! That was a lot of steps. Turns out, doing onboarding well is difficult. The good news, though, is that a complex, important project can be divided into steps and improved over time.

I wish you the best of luck creating a sustainable, self-improving onboarding program. I’d love to hear about your experiences, and I’d be happy to help if I can!

1. Hat tip to Manager Tools for being a fine example of actionable guidance. For guidance relevant to this post, check out their Onboarding Basics and Onboarding Checklist casts! [↩]
2. algorithms are processes:  sets of steps taken in order [↩]
3. That’s one of the steps! [↩]
4. I’d recommend something electronic and easily editable for initial work, and something easily shared for the final version [↩]
5. Please don’t use a Jira project for onboarding. [↩]
6. Like we didn’t for GIS techs! [↩]
7. Sometimes “as late in the process as possible” is “first thing on Day 1” [↩]
8. At this point, your onboarding plan is already far better than what most companies have.  Congratulations! [↩]
9. about onboarding or anything else [↩]
10. When I was working in railroad safety, most new employees in our office got a “Positive Train Control 101” session with me.  It was an introductory whiteboarding session that covered a lot of ground.  Before I left, we recorded a PTC 101 session for future trainers to refer to.  That’s just one example of materials that might help a sponsor. [↩]
11. If you’re the manager, try to avoid being out of the office when someone is starting. I realize there are circumstances that might require that to happen—but as far as it depends on you, keep it from happening. [↩]
12. Maintenance might be a good word to describe what you’re doing here. [↩]