The startup employee onboarding checklist

A good onboarding checklist starts the day someone signs and runs for ninety days, not one morning. It assigns every task to a named owner with a due date tied to the start date, so nothing falls into the gap between IT, the hiring manager, and whoever handles paperwork. And it comes with a mirror image for the exit, because the cost of a sloppy offboarding is higher than a sloppy welcome.

What follows is a template you can copy, not a lecture. Each stage lists the task, who owns it, and when it is due relative to day one. Adjust the owners to your team, but keep the shape: named people, real dates, and an exit that undoes everything the entrance set up.

Before day one: from signature to start

The work that decides whether day one feels organised happens in the days before it. This is the stage most startups skip, and it is the one a new hire notices most.

• Send the signed offer and contract to the record. Owner: HR or founder. Due: on signing. Store the executed documents where they belong, not in an inbox.
• Collect onboarding paperwork. Owner: HR or founder. Due: one week before start. Tax and identity forms, bank details for payroll, emergency contact, and any right-to-work documents. Collect them before the first payment, not after.
• Order the laptop and any hardware. Owner: IT. Due: as soon as the start date is set. Hardware has a lead time and a missing laptop on day one is the most visible failure there is.
• Create accounts and set access. Owner: IT. Due: two days before start. Email, single sign-on, and the specific tools this role needs, scoped to the role rather than handed the keys to everything.
• Set up payroll. Owner: HR or founder. Due: before the first pay run. Confirm salary, start date, and bank details are in the system so the first payslip is correct.
• Write the first-week plan. Owner: hiring manager. Due: three days before start. A calendar with real meetings, a first task, and the people they will meet. An empty first week reads as an afterthought.
• Assign a buddy. Owner: hiring manager. Due: three days before start. One named person whose job is to answer the small questions that are too minor to raise with a manager.
• Send a welcome note. Owner: hiring manager. Due: two days before start. Start time, where to go or which link to join, dress code if there is one, and what to expect on the first day.

Day one: access and belonging

The first day has two jobs. Make sure the person can actually work, and make sure they feel like they have joined something rather than been processed by it.

• Welcome and workspace. Owner: buddy or manager. Due: first hour. Greet them, hand over the laptop, and get them logged in.
• Confirm access works. Owner: IT. Due: first hour. Email, single sign-on, and the core tools, tested rather than assumed.
• Complete self-service setup. Owner: employee. Due: day one. The new hire fills in their own profile, uploads a photo, and checks their details in the directory, so the record is theirs from the start.
• Walk through the essentials. Owner: manager. Due: day one. How leave works, how to log time, where documents live, who to ask for what. This is also the moment to issue the handbook and record the acknowledgement against a version, because an acknowledgement of an unversioned document is worth very little two years later.
• Set the ninety-day picture. Owner: manager. Due: day one. A short, honest version of what good looks like at ninety days, so the goal exists from the first morning.
• Team introductions. Owner: buddy. Due: day one. The people they will work with most, in person or over a call, not a wall of names in a spreadsheet.

The first week: from setup to contribution

The aim of week one is to move the person from set up to genuinely useful, and to surface any problem while it is still small.

• Ship a first real task. Owner: manager. Due: by day three. Something small, real, and finishable. The first contribution matters more than the size of it.
• Meet the wider team. Owner: buddy. Due: through the week. The functions this role touches, so the map of who does what starts to form.
• Confirm documents are complete. Owner: HR. Due: by day five. Anything outstanding from before the start, closed off before it is forgotten.
• First manager check-in. Owner: manager. Due: end of week one. Fifteen honest minutes: what is unclear, what is missing, what feels off. Cheap to run and expensive to skip.

The first 90 days: the part that decides it

Access and introductions are the easy part. Whether a hire works out is usually settled in the first three months, and that needs deliberate structure rather than good intentions.

• Set thirty, sixty, and ninety-day goals. Owner: manager. Due: end of week one. Written down and agreed, so progress is a fact rather than a feeling.
• Weekly one-to-ones. Owner: manager. Due: every week. The single most useful habit, and the first to be dropped when things get busy.
• Thirty-day review. Owner: manager. Due: day thirty. Is the picture what both sides expected. Correct course now, not at ninety days.
• Sixty-day review. Owner: manager. Due: day sixty. Progress against goals, and an early read on fit while there is still time to act on it.
• Probation or ninety-day review. Owner: manager and HR. Due: day ninety. A real decision, documented, with the outcome recorded on the person’s file. Treat the date as a commitment, because a probation window that quietly lapses is a review you never had.

Offboarding: the same checklist in reverse

Offboarding is onboarding run backwards, and it carries more risk. An exit that leaves an account live or a laptop unreturned is a security and compliance problem, not just untidy. Build offboarding as its mirror while you are writing this one, so the exit sequence exists before the first person needs it. What follows is the short version of it.

• Record the exit and set the date. Owner: HR or founder. Due: on notice. The exit date drives every task below, the way the start date drove the ones above.
• Plan the handover. Owner: manager. Due: through the notice period. Who takes which responsibilities, and what needs documenting before knowledge walks out.
• Revoke access on the exit date. Owner: IT. Due: exit date. Single sign-on, email, and every tool, switched off on the day, not the week after.
• Recover assets. Owner: IT. Due: exit date. Laptop, hardware, and anything else issued. Carry a return-assets item on the exit checklist and pair it with a report of what is still out, so “we think we got the laptop back” becomes something you can check rather than something you remember.
• Final pay and documents. Owner: HR or founder. Due: per local rules. The settlement on exit covers the leave balance, the notice position and any recoveries, alongside the statutory paperwork and the leaving documents the person is owed.
• Preserve the record. Owner: HR. Due: exit date. Keep the file and documents for as long as the law requires, and decide how the person reaches their own copies afterwards, since a work email is switched off on the last day and a payslip request is not.

The reason to keep all of this in one system rather than a spreadsheet is that the checklist can do the remembering for you. In the Capstan core, onboarding and offboarding checklists assign each task to an owner with a due date tied to the start or exit date, and a checklist definition cannot be deleted while something still points at it. It is free up to twenty active employees.

Two boundaries worth knowing, because guides usually skip them. An exit with assets still issued raises a flag on the settlement surface and shows up in an unreturned-at-exit report; it does not block the exit, deliberately, because a person’s last day should not hinge on a piece of hardware. And the two things that make the tail end of this work well, asset tracking and former-employee self-service, are paid modules rather than part of the free core, so they arrive when you switch them on rather than by default. Contractor onboarding runs the same shape through the contractor module, which is likewise paid.

Where to go next

If you are still choosing the system that will run this, the startup HR software guide covers when to adopt and how to read the market, and the piece on HRIS, HRMS, and HCM untangles the labels so you buy the record you need rather than a suite you do not.