Employee onboarding is a high-stakes business. 31% of people will leave a new job within the first six months, and up to 40% of executives churn within the first eight months.  Replacing these people can cost upwards of 90% of the churned employee’s salary, a high price to pay in 2022’s environment of wage inflation and stiff hiring competition.

A strong onboarding process reduces the risk of new hire churn. HR teams need to get new hires set up technically, yes; but they also need to help them become operationally functional, and socially integrated into their new team. New hires who feel set up for success, operationally and socially, are more likely to stay.

The Eduflow team has gathered together 20 onboarding templates to help HR teams plan the perfect new hire experience, including the very onboarding plan we use with our own team. Check out the new hire checklists, onboarding templates and onboarding plans linked below.
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The Onboarding Template Eduflow Uses to Welcome New Team Members

The Eduflow team may be small (15 of us!) but we take our onboarding process seriously. We use Eduflow itself to run our onboarding programs, sending each new member of the team through an interactive, social onboarding experience. You can access and replicate the same onboarding plan by creating a free-forever Eduflow account.

The template can be modified to suit different types of businesses, roles, and onboarding needs. But whatever your needs, we recommend checking out the following features of the template, which have been helpful for getting our new hires up to speed:

Social integration and learning: The template shows you how to hook new hires up with a buddy or mentor, and organize meet-ups between these people on the new hire’s first day.
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Role-based onboarding: The template makes use of tags, so you can customize the onboarding content people see depending on role, location, or anything else. This means you can have just one onboarding flow for numerous new hires.
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Self-paced learning: Our onboarding plan is 100% self-directed, making it a great fit for hybrid or remote teams.

On the back-end of the template, HR teams can track new hire progress through modules, making it easy to identify where new folks might be getting stuck on new information. And if our onboarding template doesn’t fit your needs, keep scrolling to find alternatives below.

Pre-onboarding checklists & templates

Between the stress of hiring and the rush to onboard new folks, it’s easy to forget the importance of pre-onboarding. But pre-onboarding—the period between a new hire signing their contract and actually starting, is the perfect time to get everything prepped behind the scenes. Try these templates and resources to help your team get ready for a new hire’s arrival:

• Asana’s new employee onboarding checklist
• Eduflow’s pre-onboarding template
• Valamis’ pre-onboarding checklist
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Remote onboarding checklists & templates

There are two key challenges with remote onboarding: conveying company culture, and building social bonds between new and established team members. The resources below will help you do that:

• Breezy’s remote employee onboarding checklist
• Snackation’s remote employee onboarding checklist
• Workable’s remote new hire checklist for HR teams
• Indeed’s checklist and sample schedule
• Whatfix’s remote onboarding checklist

We also recommend Eduflow’s webinar with GitLab’s Head of Remote Darren Murph, which explores how people teams can support remote employees better.
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Sales onboarding checklists & templates

Sales teams are under a lot of pressure to ramp up fast. Plus they have to become experts in your product or service, in the target market, and start to fill their pipeline. It’s a lot! Try building your sales onboarding plan around the free templates linked below:

• Eduflow's free sales onboarding template
• Mindtickle’s sales onboarding checklist (pdf)
• Fit Small Business’ essential sales onboarding plan
• MapMyCustomers’ 30-60-90 day plan for sales training
• HubSpot’s sales training manual and template
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Manager onboarding checklists & templates

New managers, whether external hires or internal promotions, need to be onboarded with a focus on their wider team. That means helping the new manager understand the company culture and their role in it, their responsibilities for direct reports, and expectations around not just their own role, but their reports’ roles as well.

• Breezy’s new manager onboarding checklist
• Workable’s new manager checklist
• OfficeVibe’s new manager checklist
• Edge’s new manager onboarding guide (pdf)

Trello also has a good overview post of manager onboarding, and free resources for managers, which we recommend checking out.
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Developer onboarding checklists & templates

Competition to hire developers is fierce, and you definitely don’t want to have to replace a highly talented new engineering hire because of a bad onboarding experience. These checklists will help you keep new devs happy:

• Adeva’s guide to onboarding developers remotely
• Process St’s developer onboarding checklist for startups
• Soshace’s onboarding checklist for web developers

Also, the dev community Stack Overflow has some solid content on the developer employee experience. Try this post on the secrets to great dev onboarding.
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IT onboarding checklists

Getting new hires set up with the tools and IT access they need is a crucial part of helping them feel welcome on day one. Whether you have a dedicated IT team or not, these checklists will ensure you don’t miss anything important pre-start:

• Breezy’s IT checklist
• GroveHR’s IT onboarding checklist (gated pdf)
• Eddy’s guide to IT onboarding
• AlertSoftware’s ultimate IT onboarding checklist (gated pdf)