Ideas for an Onboarding Checklist

We recently had a new person join my team, and I wanted to get them up and running quickly. You know, 'cause I'm a manager.

I tried an experiment, and I think it worked out well - I made an extensive onboarding checklist as a google doc, using the checklist type of bulleted list.

The advantages of this were:

• I could share it with the person who was onboarding ahead of their start date just so they knew what would be happening
• They could update it easily as they checked things off the list
• They could ask questions in the form of document comments

So far it seems to have worked! In two days they've accessed all of our systems and have our main applications running locally.

If you are making an onboarding checklist, here are some things that you may want to include:

• Information on how to log into a work-provided machine. If there is an IT / support phone number, include it in case they run into problems right away.
• Your contact info - email, phone, etc - so they can contact you if need be
• Links to any onboarding tickets you have in your support system - that's really for your reference
• A glossary of important terms, acronyms, etc that will likely come up
• A list of people they are likely to work with, and their role
• Call outs to important appointments during their first few days - orientations, HR meetings, etc
  • Include links to the virtual versions of these meetings if you can get a hold of them, in case the person can't access their email before these meetings
• Make sure they can access basic business resources - intranets, project management, timesheet entry, support desk, etc
• A list of tools they may need to install in order to get running, such as
  • node & npm
  • xcode command line tools
  • brew
  • docker
• Links to important repos
• Links to documentation

My thought process was to capture all of the "Oh yeah, you'll need ..." things into one document. I also now have a handy starting point for future onboarding as well!