Emilia Gette serves as a marketing associate at Workast, specializing in crafting innovative strategies to engage with the audience. With a focus on creativity and attention to detail, she contributes to driving impactful results across various marketing channels.
52% of new hires say onboarding spends too much time on admin rather than role training. These are the businesses that hand a new hire a stack of forms and call it onboarding. Then they spend the first week hunting for logins and reading policy documents instead of doing the job.
Instead, we’ve a checklist that fixes this by tracking readiness, not just paperwork. Getting a new hire productive means enabling them to share a piece of real work by their first Friday. The action items below point to that one outcome, from the week before the hire starts through their first Friday on the job.
Before a new hire even logs in, you should have a ready reckoner with a fixed checklist.
Getting this wrong costs a lot. SHRM puts the cost of replacing an employee at 50% to 200% of their annual salary, depending on the role, and a bad first week is where that risk starts.
Three key items here are as follows:
This requires provisioning the new hire's laptop, email, and chat accounts, and ensuring they’re active. They’ll also need access to day-to-day tools, and they'll be waiting at the front desk for them to arrive.
Instead of having a new hire figure out their tasks, name their first one. For example, it could be closing two support tickets from the queue by Thursday.
A single point of contact helps a new hire get to know their direct manager, who can assign tasks and share what a typical day looks like.
Now that you’ve figured out all the access and ready-to-do items for them, make sure you’re prepping the necessary assets for them.
This is essentially preboarding you set up before the hire's start date.
Send equipment 3-5 days out. Equipment here means the laptop, monitor, and any physical badge or key fob the hire needs on day one, apart from the account logins.
If the hire is starting remotely, shipping and time zones mean remote onboarding takes longer, and no one is down the hall to hand over a spare charger.
For project-based roles, access should also cover the systems the hire will use; for example, home builders using Ressio can give new team members access to the schedules, project details, files, and other job information.
Block time on your calendar for a day-one intro call. Book it as the first item on the hire's calendar. Use the 30-minute call to restate the first task and its due date, along with key aspects discussed above.
Replace the policy binder with a one-page "what to expect" doc that contains three key things.
Hire's first meeting time
First point of contact
Where to park or log in.
We know binders are rarely read beyond the day of joining and are usually just skimmed. No new hire will keep it. Instead, give them a one-page doc they can check all week.
This is the crucial day when you complete the two steps above in the onboarding process. To make it count, let Day One rest on three checkpoints:
Test every tool the hire needs before they try to use it. Every tool here includes single sign-on, email, the team's chat tool, and whatever tracker the hire will use for their first task.
The exact setup will depend on the role. For example, a new hire at a glass contractor may need access to Glazier Software to work with job details, schedules, and other day-to-day project information.
In the first meeting, state the first task and its due date. 1,000 HR leaders: 28.8% reported that hiring managers give new hires no training or guidance. Stating the task and its deadline out loud in the first meeting is an alternative.
By the end of day one, the hire should be able to log in, find the team channel, and name who to ask for what. If any of these three things isn't true by 5 PM, day one didn't do its job.
These are the days when onboarding starts showing results, moving the hire toward a finished task by day five as shadowing activities wind down.
Shadowing means the hire watches one teammate complete the exact workflow for their first deliverable, not just a training video. The task they shadow should be the same one they'll be asked to do.
Run a 15-minute manager check-in on day three. Don't schedule it until the end of the week. Use it to ask what's confusing that may pose a challenge over the next few days.
The task on day 4 or 5 should be small enough to finish in a day and connected to the deliverable determined on day one. Give feedback the same day the hire finishes it. A hire who shares something by Friday, even a small piece, has proof they can do the job.
The checklist is only productive when every item has an owner and a date attached.
Assign each item to a name, HR, IT, or a related department. Set the deadline relative to the hire's actual start date rather than bucketing everything into week one.
Track one number once week one ends and see whether the hire finished and shared a piece of work by Friday. That single number tells you if the checklist worked.
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