An onboarding checklist for a new hire at a small firm

For a small firm, a bad first week is expensive twice: in the new hire’s wasted time, and in the quiet signal it sends about how the place is run. And the research says most firms get it wrong.

The evidence: onboarding is usually bad, and it matters

Gallup found only 12% of employees say their company does a good job of onboarding — and that the stakes are real: employees who had an exceptional onboarding experience are far more likely to say they have "the best possible job" and to be extremely satisfied at work, and when a manager takes an active role, people are several times more likely to call their onboarding a success. New hires typically take around a year to reach full performance, so the first weeks are not a formality; they are where retention is won or lost. The fix is not a platform — it is a checklist someone owns.

Before day one

• Send the offer and appointment letter, and collect the documents you need back — ID and address proof, PAN, bank details.
• Create their logins and decide, deliberately, what they can and cannot see.
• Set up their attendance and leave record so day one counts from day one.
• Tell the team someone is joining, and who is their first point of contact.

Week one

• A real first task, not just reading — people learn a firm by doing something small and useful in it.
• Introduce the tools your team runs on: where work lives, how tasks get assigned, how clients are handled.
• Walk them through one live client end to end.
• Book a five-minute end-of-week check-in — the single highest-leverage thing a manager can do.

The first month

• Confirm PF/ESI enrolment and payroll details before the first salary run.
• Set two or three clear probation expectations, so "how am I doing?" has an answer.
• Give them ownership of something small and whole — a client, a recurring task, a piece of the board that is theirs.