Human resources are a key asset for any company. Once your HR department has shortlisted the most suitable candidates for a job, it is usually the senior management who calls the final shots and decides who, out of a pool of candidates, is the best fit for the job and the organization.
But taking a new employee on board is as challenging as exciting. From running background checks and ensuring all legal and regulatory requirements are met, to familiarizing them with their new workplace, team, and role – all this takes a great deal of hard work & effort on the part of HR professionals.
Lucky for you, we help you elevate and expedite your HR game by providing free-of-cost, print-ready, and customizable New Hiring templates to help you engage with employees throughout their journey with your organization.
In this post, we provide an overview of four different templates that HR professionals can use at three different times of hiring:
- Preboarding: The time between a new hire accepting a job offer and their official joining. Our Pre-boarding New Hire Checklist helps you in this process by covering all documentary requirements that must be met before you take someone on board.
- Onboarding: The process of introducing and integrating a new hire into your company and its culture. Our Onboarding Checklist is a valuable HR tool to make sure a new employee has all the tools, information, skills, and professional interactions they need to become a productive member of your team.
- Offboarding: Refers to the process of managing an employee’s formal exit from a company. Our Exit Interview form has been specially designed to extract constructive feedback from leaving employees as well as to make sure they are dispossessed of all company assets such as equipment, email accounts, company credit cards, etc.
Now, let’s explore each of our templates in more detail:
New Hire Checklist
Most, if not all, hiring starts with a job advertisement. Once suitable candidates respond, submit their interest, and their resumes/cover letters are vetted by an HR professional, a series of initial interviews are conducted to assess the strengths & weaknesses of individual candidates in detail. The lucky select ones are given a formal job offer; if a candidate accepts, the hiring officially moves into the preboarding stage, that is, the time between a candidate formally accepting a job offer to their joining.
A structured checklist is the best way to make sure no important detail is missed out during onboarding as it helps you identify and track specific tasks that need to be done during this time. At its core, our New Hire Checklist offers a roadmap of all documentary requirements that must be met for a new hire: from legal requirements such as proof of citizenship status and tax forms to a company’s hiring SOPs.
Our template covers four different types of documentation:
Employee verification documents
This first part of our checklist allows you to verify the personal details and work history of applicants, such as collecting background check consent forms, proof of immunization records, Social Security and National Insurance numbers, as well as verify previous job experiences by reaching out to past employers.
Offer and employment documents
For this part of our checklist, our template helps you keep a record of the new employee’s acceptance of the offer, payroll forms as well as personal information such as emergency contact forms and medical information forms.
Legal and compliance documents
Here, we list down specific documents an HR department is legally obliged to file & archive as part of the onboarding process, such as proof of eligibility to work (Social Security Card, US Passport, I-9 form), a copy of the signed contract, tax forms, and a non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement.
Benefits enrollment
In this part, we make sure you have all the documentation you need to process any benefits the new employee may be eligible for including, the provision of allowance, health insurance, and retirement plans.
A new hire checklist is a valuable tool for solving the problem of tracking multiple hiring steps while ensuring compliance with legal and organizational requirements. By following a structured template, HR can efficiently onboard new employees, making sure no important tasks or requirements are overlooked.
Spearhead a successful onboarding process that makes an impact with our fillable New Hire Checklist, available in Word, Google Docs, and PDF formats.
Pre Boarding Checklist
This checklist is used by HR professionals and hiring managers during the preboarding stage. In this stage, the HR prepares the employee for their first day at work by ensuring they have a functional workspace, access to necessary resources, and all paperwork in order. Our template is a structured tool to help integrate new employees and ensure their smooth transition into the company.
We divide our checklist into four sections:
Documentation and compliance
Pre-boarding involves a significant amount of paperwork. Here, we cover the most common documentary requirements to be met before the official joining date, such as collecting signed offer letters & relevant documents, scanned photos & copies of ID, obtaining verification consent, running necessary background checks, and setting up an employee profile in the HR system.
IT set up
A modern workplace relies on the use of digital platforms and devices. In this part of our checklist, we help you navigate the various IT-related needs of new hires during preboarding, such as creating an official email account, provisioning necessary hardware, installing job-related software, and setting up access to relevant systems and networks.
Workspace preparation
An organized workspace is a sign of a healthy work environment. Here, we create a list of all the necessary arrangements that need to be made for the new employee to start working, such as reserving a desk or workspace, ordering necessary supplies, and setting up phones and other communication tools such as fax machines and WiFi.
Training and orientation material
Proper training and orientation are crucial as they help new hires feel valued while setting a positive tone for their employment. To ensure you are prepared in advance to bring a new hire on board, our template provides a list of things you need to do, inlcyding preparing a welcome package, ID cards, and entry badges as well as compiling your orientation resources (online or otherwise) in one place and setting up a training schedule for the first week.
Team introductions
Teamwork is key to achieving organizational goals and creating a positive work environment. To ensure every new hire is well integrated into the existing team and work culture, our template contains a list of to-do items for you to check off, including, a welcome announcement (say, via E-mail), setting up any introductory one-on-one meetings necessary, and scheduling a team lunch or welcome event.
A pre-boarding checklist template like ours solves the problem of unpreparedness on the part of new hires or HR departments, helping them avoid a chaotic or overwhelming first day by ensuring all necessary preparations, in terms of resources, workspace, and initial paperwork are completed on time in a standardized way.
Our fillable Pre-boarding Checklist is available in Word and PDF formats.
Onboarding Checklist Template
This checklist is designed to meet the needs and requirements of the onboarding process – that is, the process through which new employees gain the knowledge, skills, and behaviors needed to integrate into an organization.
Our Onboarding Checklist template is a useful tool for HR teams & officials to ensure all key onboarding steps & processes are completed. We use four different time frames to determine how well (or to what extent) a new employee is adapting to their role & environment over time.
These are:
First day
For this section, we focus on handing new employees materials such as policy handbooks with information about the organization’s policies, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and core values. We follow this up with a guided tour of the workplace to make sure the new employee knows their way around the office.
Once an HR official has explained the specific duties and performance metrics of the job, it’s time to introduce the new hire to the rest of the team. This may be done through a welcome email announcement or one-on-one meetings.
Now, make sure new employees have access to all the tools and gadgets (laptops, smartphones) as well as any systems or networks such as Slack or ZOOM they need to get on with their work.
First week
The first week is a crucial time for HR managers as new employees prepare to take on their new roles. Our template understands this time frame as involving 2 different types of tasks, (a) Check-in and orientation, say, making sure they have all the information they need to perform their jobs such as phone directories, and (b) Membership and social integration activities to assimilate the employee into the existing team framework. This can be done through ice-breaking activities, and by formally assigning them a work mentor or buddy.
In the end, we add a separate box reminding you to review the employee’s first-week performance with relevant team members, such as a line manager.
First month
By the end of the first month, both employees and the organization have had a chance to explore each other’s strengths & weaknesses so in this part of our checklist, we focus on:
- Progress Review and Development (say, employee feedback on how smooth the onboarding process was for them)
- Training and Development (such as the need for any role-specific training, learning platform access, or shadowing schemes)
First 90 days
Generally, this period is deemed enough to determine if a new hire is a good fit for your organization. Here’s a list of things (included in our template) that you might want to do during this period:
- Schedule check-ins with the new employee’s manager or the head of HR
- Conduct a formal 90-day review of the employee’s progress and performance
- Create a future development plan for the employee
- Discuss opportunities for the employee’s future career growth and development
- Follow up on any team-building activities that the employee has participated in to foster greater cultural assimilation
Feel free to use our fillable and editable Onboarding Checklist, available in PDF and WORD formats!
Exit Interview Form Template
Not every employee you hire will stick around in your organization for good. Whether for personal or professional reasons, sometimes you have to let employees go. But before you do this, there is one last HR procedure you need to carry out – an exit interview.
An exit interview is a formal way to get feedback from employees who are leaving a company. You can think of it as a chance for departing employees to get closure as well as a tool for HR managers to gain an employee perspective on what areas an organization can improve.
To make the exit interview process more detailed and result-driven, we have designed a comprehensive exit interview form template. Our customizable template starts with an introductory section to fill out individual employee details, followed by a detailed feedback form divided into five thematic areas, each focusing on a specific aspect of the employee experience, i.e., Roles & Responsibilities, Management, Workplace Environment, Career Development & Opportunities, and Technology & Resources. We also include two special checklists to help HR keep track of company assets & equipment, as well as ensure all formal requirements are met during the offboarding process.
Other features of our template include:
Equipment & asset return:
This section provides a checklist of any company-owned equipment or assets in the possession of the departing employee during their job tenure. To help you customize this section for your organizational context, we add an ‘Other’ option to cover any assets or equipment not listed in our checklist.
Employee acknowledgment
By signing this section, the employee confirms that the information or feedback they have provided is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and experience. Secondly, they formally declare that they have returned all company property (assets, equipment, etc.,).
For HR use only
We also add a section for the HR manager to sign and date the form, thus verifying that the exit process is complete and approved by the organization. This checklist will include things like ensuring a review of the confidentiality agreement, disbursement of any outstanding payment, or the verified return of company assets & equipment.
Our Exit Form Template offers a comprehensive guide for HR managers to explore insightful questions that can help them improve employee retention and identify specific areas of improvement in terms of workplace culture, management style, and employee benefits. You can easily customize the questions & checklists in our free template to suit your specific organizational needs & contexts.
Step up your HR game today with our practical, print-ready template available in PDF and WORD formats.
Wrap Up
And there you have it. Our complete HR toolkit to help you constructively engage with your employees every step of the way!
At WordLayout, we save you hours in research and design by offering standardized templates for you to use! All our HR templates covering preboarding, onboarding, and offboarding processes are easily customizable and can be edited as Word files to suit your own industry needs and organizational context.
Remember, different industries and state jurisdictions have different legal & regulatory requirements when it comes to employment law. Our checklists are based on the most common and frequently used documents when hiring and onboarding a new employee in the US.
