New employee onboarding checklist

This scopes the onboarding of a single hire before it starts. It takes the kind of role, where the person will work, the equipment and access items you have to issue, the role training planned for the first month, the manager's hourly cost and how long a named buddy stays attached, and returns the size of the checklist, how much of it is due on or before day one, the hours of manager and admin time involved and what that time costs. The point is to see the job whole before the first day, not to discover it item by item.

Day one is a deadline, not a welcome

Roughly half the checklist is due before the person arrives: the contract signed, the handbook acknowledged, tax and eligibility forms completed, payroll set up, a desk or a laptop that works, and every login that the first morning needs. The page splits the list into what is due by day one and what is due in the first thirty days because they have different owners, the office before the start and the manager after it, and a checklist that does not say which is which gets the first half done late.

Remote and hybrid hires need more items, not fewer

A person on site can ask the next desk. A remote hire needs the equipment shipped, the accounts created in advance, a scheduled introduction to every person they will work with and a written explanation of how the team communicates. The page scales the item count up for hybrid and remote roles for that reason, and the difference is the list of things a remote hire otherwise discovers alone.

Manager time is the real cost of onboarding

The equipment is a one-off and the forms are administrative. The expensive part is the manager's time: the induction conversations, the check-ins, the buddy weeks, and the training hours that come out of somebody's productive week. The page prices that time at the manager's true hourly cost, which is the figure to compare against the cost of a hire that leaves in month three.