10 Employee Onboarding Checklist Templates in Excel & ClickUp

Hiring your dream team is only half the battle—now you’ve go to retain them!

…And what’s the first step in reducing employee churn and keeping your best people by your side? An effective onboarding process!

Your team, HR department, and personal experience can surely tell you that employee onboarding is no walk in the park. That’s why the top companies and managers lean on customizable onboarding checklist templates to keep everything running smoothly from your new hire’s very first day.

With so many distinct org structures and checklist templates to choose from, integrating the right template into your onboarding process can be tiresome and time-consuming if you don’t know what features to look for. 

But we’re here to help! With a full breakdown of everything you need to know about employee onboarding and the essential features to look for in your next onboarding checklist template. Plus access 10 of the best employee onboarding checklists and templates directly from this article!

Let’s dive in. 🤿

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What is an Onboarding Checklist Template?

The onboarding process can feel a bit like a juggling act managing steps, documents, and people at once—that’s why we suggest starting with and customizing an onboarding template!

Onboarding templates are pre-built, collaborative documents to standardize and expedite the onboarding process for future new hires. 

Your template may come in the form of a checklist, pre-made tasks, training materials, best practices, and more to launch your onboarding program into action. Your template may even include each of these components bundled together! The goal is to help you create an efficient onboarding process or improve upon the one you already have in place. This ensures that each new hire has a consistent and streamlined onboarding experience, and no employee falls through the cracks within their first few weeks.

Even if your org is already working with other HR templates, using one that is specific to onboarding will help you streamline the overall process, realize areas you might’ve missed, and make the experience more engaging all around. 

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Essential Elements of an Effective Onboarding Template

A tell-tale sign of a high-quality onboarding template is its flexibility. This ensures your template can be easily adapted to your organization, from role to role, and by each new hire that uses it. Your onboarding template should help you quickly achieve some (or all) of the following goals: 

• Set clear onboarding expectations and objectives for your new hires to understand the process to come
• Create a standardized process and roadmap for employees to use as a resource and follow at their own pace
• Foster clear communication between the new employee, their manager, other stakeholders in the organization, and your HR or People Operations teams
• Encourage employee engagement with members outside of their immediate team. This helps new hires know that you care about their growth, fosters a healthy company culture, and drives new mentorships

You may not need all of these elements in your next onboarding template, but you will need an established HR software or project management solution to achieve any of them!

Within your preferred onboarding software, there are several necessary features to look for no matter what your HR KPIs and onboarding goals are. Including:

• Custom statuses to quickly communicate where each new hire is with each onboarding task
• ClickUp Tasks and checklists to document the steps in your onboarding process and mark whether they’ve been completed
• Automations to help new hires move through the onboarding process as quickly as possible—even asynchronously 
• Multiple views so new hires and managers can visualize onboarding task lists, schedules, workloads, progress, and more
• Custom Fields to attach and access key information like documents, hiring dates, salaries, equipment needs, security stages, and more
• Multiple integrations to bring more context from other work tools into your onboarding template 

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10 Onboarding Templates

We’ve covered the onboarding basics and significant elements of any successful onboarding checklist template, now it’s time to put that knowledge to the test!

Consider the needs, roles, and requirements of your organization as you browse 10 of the best onboarding checklist templates for any team.

1. Onboarding Checklist Template by ClickUp

Starting things off nice and simple, the Onboarding Checklist Template by ClickUp applies a thorough, pre-built task List to your Workspace. Task templates are excellent resources for building reusable day-to-day processes, and with nine Custom Fields, this template will also keep each candidate’s information neatly organized and easily accessible. 

This is a great template for the onboarding team and managers to use for each new hire, where each task can be renamed to track the employee’s progress throughout the onboarding process.

When you open this task template, you’ll immediately see the Getting Started Guide in the task description, along with a breakdown of each Custom Field you’ll find below it and any relevant Help Docs.

From there, the task is broken down further into nine subtasks that cover everything from team introductions through equipment checklists—even a reminder to send the employee a post-onboarding survey!

Bonus: Meet the Team Templates

2. Employee Onboarding Template by ClickUp

While the previous onboarding checklist template is straightforward and beginner-friendly, the Employee Onboarding Template by ClickUp is where things start to dig deeper. In this detailed Folder, you’ll find:

• Three custom statuses
• 25 Custom Fields
• Seven workflow views

And more to thoroughly immerse your new hire in your company’s best practices, policies, culture, values, and processes. With more advanced features—including automations to create new subtasks as Custom Fields change—managers can streamline communication between teams during the onboarding process.

In your onboarding Folder, you’ll find separate Lists for HR, legal, IT, and security teams, and corresponding tasks for each new hire organized on a Kanban board using Board view in ClickUp. Separate Lists will help the members and managers keep track of the items other departments are accountable for during the onboarding like equipment shipments, desk assignments, payroll, benefits, and much more. 

And with pre-made Custom Fields for the employee’s department, title, start date, email, and onboarding stage, managers, watchers, and assignees can easily access basic but important information at a glance—without having to click into a task or away from your Kanban board. 

3. Employee Onboarding Doc Template by ClickUp

Taking things further yet again, the Employee Onboarding Doc Template by ClickUp walks you through the process of building a weeks-long onboarding process, virtually from scratch. The major difference between this template and the ones we saw ahead of it? This template is less of a resource for managers and more so for the new hire to follow along themselves.

This template applies an entire Space to your platform with separate Lists for each new hire. In their individual List, they’ll find tasks broken down week by week, guiding them through every action item—from setting up an email signature to developing their quarterly goals. 

Designed to map out your new hire’s first 90 days, this template packs a punch on the features front. With eight custom statuses, Custom Fields, five ClickApps, and three workflow views to ensure employees have everything they need to stay on top of their onboarding workloads.

Not sure where to begin with such a loaded template? Start with the comprehensive Getting Started ClickUp Doc to make your setup process as efficient as possible.

4. General Employee Onboarding Template by ClickUp

The General Employee Onboarding Template by ClickUp is a scaled-up variation of the onboarding checklist task template we saw earlier. With additional custom statuses, workflow views, Help Docs, and Custom Fields, this template provides a thorough roadmap of the entire onboarding process to guarantee a good first impression.

Especially if you’re managing multiple new hires at a time across different departments, this thorough list will help onboarding managers build out realistic timelines for any number of activities—plus, a pre-built Kanban board to oversee all task progress.  

5. New Hire Onboarding Template by ClickUp

The New Hire Onboarding Template by ClickUp is the onboarding checklist you wish you had on your own first day. Designed for the employee, this template helps new members hold themselves accountable with customizable tasks throughout their first month. It shows them what needs to be done, how much time they have to complete it, and what will happen next. 

Plus, Custom Fields shows the new hire key information from a high-level view, including which departments own what tasks, deadlines, priorities, progress percentages, and more. 

6. Remote Onboarding Template by ClickUp

The transition from in-person to remote working can be lengthy and sometimes bumpy—it also requires an onboarding process of its own! Even if you’re coming from a small organization that’s worked together at length, each member must follow the proper steps to make sure they’re working from home effectively and efficiently from the jump.

The Remote Onboarding Template by ClickUp is a great way to ease new and existing team members into using a dynamic productivity tool like ClickUp, master its features, and create new digital processes as quickly as possible. 

This template keeps it simple with a Folder of pre-built tasks to help you learn ClickUp’s top features, along with three custom statuses, Custom Fields, and views to guide members through the key action items in your onboarding process. 

7. 30-60-90 Day Plan Template by ClickUp

Onboarding a new employee requires more time, effort, and action than you might think—and it’s definitely bigger than a single item on your list. It takes frequent attention, planning, and following up to make sure your new hires have both completed the necessary steps and are settling in well.

The beginner-friendly 30-60-90 Day Plan Template by ClickUp was created to remedy this exact issue. With seven unique views including Kanban-like Board view, Chat view, and Calendar view, members and managers can use this List template to oversee progress throughout the onboarding process and schedule check-ins during the first three months to ensure new hires are settling in properly.  

Check out these 30-60-90 day templates!

8. Training Rollout Plan Template by ClickUp

While payroll, legal, and benefits documentation are key parts of the onboarding process, so is general training! Whether it’s specific to your new hire’s upcoming role or the organization as a whole, training can take a lot of time and arguably, the most attention to detail to ensure it’s done correctly. 

The Training Rollout Plan Template by ClickUp takes a detailed and step-by-step approach to learning everything from the foundational through advanced training. Starting with pre-made orientation tasks and moving toward professional certifications and senior-level learning, this List template can follow a new hire through their entire tenure with a company. 

In this template, you’ll also find Custom Fields to designate the training type, modality, resources, and deadlines for each training task, custom statuses to show progress, and multiple views to manage your training schedules. 

9. Employee Action Plan Template by ClickUp

A significant piece of proper onboarding includes a genuine interest in your new hire’s future with the company. The Employee Action Plan Template by ClickUp is a simple and effective way to achieve this with a customizable ClickUp Doc to identify areas of improvement and set professional goals for work. 

10. Onboarding Template for Excel

If you’re an avid Excel user, then this Onboarding Template could be you’re starting point! This spreadsheet-style checklist is downloaded immediately to your browser and breaks down the basics of onboarding into six sections:

• Pre-offer acceptance
• Pre-hire preparation
• New hire introductions (through the first week)
• New hire orientations (through the first month)
• Department orientations (through the first 90 days)
• Ongoing onboarding (through employment)

Within each section, there are more detailed action items with designated columns to note the owner of each task and the completion date. 

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Get the Team On-Board With Custom Onboarding Templates

These aren’t just 10 of the best onboarding templates—they’re also completely free to try. 

With hundreds of rich productivity features, over 1,000 integrations, and a vast Template Library, ClickUp is your first stop in creating the ideal onboarding experience for teams and organizations across industries. 

Access the templates linked above along with tons of additional and free resources when you sign up for ClickUp today.