Helping new employees feel confident and connected from day one starts with a clear onboarding checklist. Whether you’re onboarding in-office or remotely, the right process ensures no step is overlooked and every new hire can hit the ground running.
In this guide, you’ll discover why effective onboarding matters for employee retention and productivity. You’ll also get a comprehensive onboarding checklist with tips on how Kahoot! 360 can transform each step into an engaging experience that helps new hires thrive. So, read on to learn more.
What is an onboarding checklist?
An onboarding checklist is a step-by-step guide for HR teams, managers, and L&D specialists to ensure every new hire receives the right information, resources, and experiences in their first days, weeks, and months.
It covers everything from paperwork and IT setup to team introductions, training, and cultural immersion. Using a structured checklist prevents important steps from falling through the cracks, whether you’re onboarding new employees in person or virtually.
You might hear people use the terms “employee onboarding checklist,” “new hire checklist,” or “onboarding process checklist”, but all of these capture the same thing—a step-by-step guide to helping your new hires feel welcomed, engaged, and ready to make an impact.
Why checklists matter
Checklists matter because they help ensure you deliver a thoughtful onboarding process, and onboarding makes a world of difference. A Brandon Hall Group study found that companies with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by 70%.
This is largely because new hires feel supported from their first day, and have the resources they need to shorten time-to-productivity. Instead of weeks spent figuring things out, they can contribute sooner. This drives results for companies and leaves employees feeling motivated and much more likely to stick around. Without a checklist, important steps in the onboarding process can get missed, leaving new hires feeling disengaged or unsupported.
The complete new hire onboarding checklist
Let’s take a look at the different stages of an effective onboarding process, and each step that you should tick off the list. We’ll also explore how Kahoot! 360 can help you transform these stages into simple, engaging experiences that your new hires will love.
1. Pre-onboarding tasks
- Send a personalized welcome email
- Provide paperwork, benefits, and compliance documents
- Ensure IT equipment and accounts are ready
- Share the first-day schedule
As you can see above, new hires require a lot of up-front information. This information is all helpful or essential for compliance, but it can be overwhelming and a little dry. Kahoot! 360 lets you send self-paced learning content to your new hires, giving them essential information about compliance, schedules, and IT setup in an engaging and interactive format.
You can also download progress reports to see how new hires are getting on, issue completion certificates, and identify difficult areas to improve your onboarding process in the future.
2. First day tasks
- Welcome session and office tour
- Introduction to the team and manager
- Overview of company culture, mission, and values
- Provide access to the employee handbook and tools
Whether you’re onboarding employees in person or remotely, Kahoot! helps you transform live presentations into engaging two-way experiences. With interactive questions, word clouds, friendly competition with leaderboards, and fun icebreaker activities, your new hires will finish their welcome sessions and introductions feeling energized and informed.
Save time creating your introductory materials by using some of our handy templates. The Culture and Values template is perfect for introducing your company history, culture, and code of conduct, while our Getting to Know a New Colleague template is excellent for early introductions and team building.
3. First week tasks
- Introduce role-specific training and shadowing opportunities.
- Hold initial 1:1s with manager and mentor.
- Clarify role expectations and success metrics.
- Provide an organizational chart and resources.
Kahoot! 360 lets you create complete onboarding courses that combine slides with concept-checking questions—perfect for training during the early weeks. The best part is, you can generate live and self-paced content instantly from your existing materials using AI.
4. 30/60/90 day tasks
- Assign meaningful projects with clear goals
- Provide regular check-ins and feedback sessions
- Encourage participation in team events and cross-functional meetings
- Review progress and plan next steps for development
Many companies end their onboarding process after the first couple of weeks. However, this doesn’t allow new hires to offer feedback, voice concerns, or discuss how they envision their growth and development within the company
Kahoot! 360 sessions are designed to involve participants and give them a voice, making them perfect for gathering feedback and insights. With NPS scales, word clouds, and Q&A, you can easily fill your future sessions with opportunities for new hires to feel heard.
Check out our Post-Onboarding Check-In template, which makes it simple to see how your new hires are settling in.
Top tips for making onboarding engaging with Kahoot!
- Make it interactive: Avoid lecture-heavy sessions by including quizzes, polls, and word clouds.
- Blend live and self-paced learning: Reinforce key information from your live sessions with in-depth courses and bite-sized learning content.
- Track and adapt: Access reports after each Kahoot! to see how new hires have performed, where they struggled, and how you can improve your future training.
Hear how Kahoot! 360 has helped Hoteliers Kempinski and app marketers Adjust make their onboarding impactful:
“Kahoot! has made our onboarding much more efficient and engaging, which means our staff gets up and running sooner, and stays longer.”
Harrison Tompodung
Kempinski Hotels
“Kahoot! engages learners and the questions reinforce what they learned the previous day, both during the sessions and in their e-learning”
Andrea Vimercati,
Adjust
How to measure onboarding success
There are many ways to measure the success of your onboarding. Some of these include onboarding content completion rates, employee retention rates, and retention rates, and feedback from surveys and pulse checks.
With Kahoot!, you can easily see who completed their onboarding training and find out what they found easy or hard based on the questions they got right. You can also see how employees found the materials and gather insights using word clouds and NPS scales. This helps you ensure your onboarding content gets better every year.
Conclusion
A structured onboarding checklist ensures new hires feel welcomed, supported, and prepared to succeed. By following the process above and using Kahoot! 360 to make each stage interactive, engaging, and effective, you can ensure your onboarding helps you retain the best talent and empower them to work at their full potential.
Explore Kahoot! 360 plans to start transforming your company’s onboarding with the ultimate workforce engagement platform.
