How do you make an onboarding process structured, while behind the scenes, it is anything but? As an HR professional, you are expected to make the orientation smooth. In reality, it’s often a combination of scattered documents, last-minute messages, and many manual steps. The result? Hours of lost productivity, poor employee engagement, and low retention. Fortunately, it is nothing a solid onboarding plan cannot fix.
In this article, you will find essential types of templates, compare employee & customer orientation, and discover how AI can optimize the process. Let’s dive in!
What Is an Onboarding Template?
An onboarding template is a repeatable structure that outlines tasks, documents, and timelines for bringing a new employee into the organization. It helps align professionals with the team culture and performance expectations and introduces them to the workflows and tools.
Here is how an onboarding process template can help:
- Standardized onboarding across roles or departments
- Minimized gaps in training manuals, communication, or documentation
- Clearly assigned ownership: manager, HR, IT, mentor
- Tracked progress against expectations and deadlines
Think of the most effective templates as customizable frameworks: they should be structured but flexible enough to support each role or location.
Essential Types of Onboarding Templates
The onboarding document for a sales representative is different from that of a remote designer. However, no framework works across departments, so most HR teams rely on multiple onboarding templates designed for specific goals.
Below, I have prepared key template types that you can use as a foundation for orientation in your company.
Onboarding Plan Template
A structured onboarding plan template helps HR managers create a consistent experience from preboarding to the 90-day review. This template includes checklists, meeting details, tools, equipment preparations, training, and 30-60-90 goals. You can use it to assign responsibilities (RACI), link deadlines to an employee’s start date, and keep all onboarding steps in one place.
Onboarding Checklist Template
This onboarding checklist template is a great choice for HR and team managers who’d like to stay aligned. It includes a phase, task, owner, due date, and status tracker to make your onboarding process transparent. You can use it to track progress, automate task reminders, and integrate tools, ensuring a positive onboarding experience for every hire.
Onboarding Schedule Template
Are you looking for an employee onboarding template that helps schedule actions? This example includes tasks, due dates, owners, duration, and status, enabling HR managers and team leaders to coordinate responsibilities. You can use it to align Zoom or Microsoft Teams meetings, training sessions, and follow-ups.
Onboarding Document Template
Do you need a template for enrollment materials? This onboarding document template includes a welcome note, key contacts, company policies, and personalized goals. It is a solid foundation for creating structured orientation notes and making a positive employee experience.
Department-Specific Onboarding Templates
Once you have built the core onboarding structure, it is time to customize templates for each department. After all, no two teams work the same way, so the orientation process should consider these nuances. Sales agents usually require CRM setup and customer journey training, while marketing agents often begin with brand guidelines. The question is, how do you make it work?
Traditionally, I have prepared multiple new hire onboarding templates that work for the most common departments: sales, marketing, product, HR, and IT.
Sales Team Onboarding Template
Are you looking for a strong sales onboarding template that helps new agents feel confident from the start? This example is designed for sales managers, enablement teams, and HR to track performance milestones. Each orientation stage includes a brief training plan, tools, responsible owners, and deadlines to ensure every employee is aligned with your sales process.
Marketing Team Onboarding Template
This onboarding document template helps marketing hires understand the brand, tools, and campaign workflows. It includes tasks, owners, and deadlines, and covers company values, SEO & reporting software, analytics dashboards, and collaboration tools such as Airtable, Slack, HubSpot, and Sembly AI. You can use it to guide newcomers through the stages and ensure coordination between HR, marketing managers, and creative leads.
Product Team Onboarding Template
The best product onboarding templates ensure every new hire understands not just what you’re building, but why. This example includes key phases for reviewing user research, sprint planning, and roadmap execution. You may use it to improve product knowledge exchange and align everyone behind your product vision.
Project Team Onboarding Template
How do you keep every project on track when your team is still finding its rhythm? This general onboarding template provides new coordinators with a practical roadmap for effectively managing projects. It outlines steps for setting goals, defining responsibilities, managing timelines, and communicating progress. Overall, it helps HR and PM leaders structure onboarding workflows and speed up team alignment.
HR Team Onboarding Template
How do you onboard the people who welcome everyone else? This HR team onboarding document template guides newcomers through every step, helping them settle into their roles. Each orientation stage includes tasks, owners, corresponding software, and outcomes to strengthen your HR foundation and simplify new hire administration.
IT Team Onboarding Template
This IT onboarding document template includes steps for hardware setup, access permissions, and workflow automation. Each stage discusses key elements, such as orientation sessions, team introductions, benefits setup, and performance reviews. You can use this example along with your employee handbook, training schedule, and HR knowledge base.
How to Create an Effective Onboarding Template
Now that you have seen enough examples, we can move to practice. While there is no universal recipe for employee onboarding templates, some approaches to the orientation process work better than the rest.
Below, I have prepared five steps to build onboarding systems that ensure your company’s welcome is, in fact, warm.
1. Map Onboarding Stages to Measurable Results
Every onboarding stage should have trackable outcomes that are aligned with business goals. Consider replacing vague milestones such as “orientation complete” with metrics that reflect preparation levels or employee performance.
Here are examples from onboarding documents based on the stage:
- Preboarding: All logins and permissions granted before Day 1.
- Week 1: 100% of orientation tasks completed in HR software.
- Day 60: A newcomer demonstrates high proficiency in tools and product knowledge and submits the first project deliverable.
2. Personalize Onboarding Templates
Start by defining milestones specific to this role, preferred learning formats, and team dynamics. It helps each employee feel seen and supported, and most importantly, complete the probation period with confidence. Furthermore, when new hires undergo a structured orientation process, they are almost 60% more likely to stay with the company for more than 3 years (Glassdoor).
Tip: Create conditional rules in your onboarding tracker to automatically trigger role-based to-dos. Consider using AI tools, such as Sembly, to summarize orientation sessions and sync notes and tasks to your HR software.
3. Align Onboarding Templates With Long-Term Goals
What differs a weak new employee onboarding checklist from a strong one? The latter builds the foundation for professional growth and retention. Ideally, your orientation document aligns with an employee’s development goals and long-term contribution to the company. This way, you can create an experience that connects daily activities to future performance outcomes.
Example: During the 30-60-90-day stages, encourage new hires to set learning objectives based on the company’s OKRs. For instance, “Develop proficiency in Jira within 30 days.”
4. Visualize Your Onboarding Flow
Visual onboarding flowcharts or Gantt templates help HR professionals and managers track progress across teams in real time. Why is it so important? The problem with the theoretical plan or numerous spreadsheets is that HRs cannot manage what they do not see. There is no way to identify where employees get stuck and adjust your process before productivity starts to decline.
However, visualization helps to turn your onboarding into a living workflow, bringing numerous benefits:
- Clarity: HR teams can monitor each task, owner, and timeline without having to switch between tools.
- Cross-team alignment: HR, IT, and team leaders can view dependencies and collaborate if needed.
- Timely problem detection: Professionals can identify delays or problems before they influence employee productivity.
- Data-driven improvements: Visual dashboards in Smartsheet, Jira, or Asana highlight recurring issues, which can help HRs optimize their workflows.
5. Optimize Onboarding Documents with Employee Feedback
Would you like to know the simple yet effective recommendation for onboarding? Treat it like an ongoing dialogue. Too often, companies collect data once at the end of onboarding and never use it. However, when HR professionals pair feedback trends with HR analytics, they often find patterns that impact employee growth and engagement. Over time, this will help onboarding templates evolve into adaptive systems. What else can you ask for?
Here are a few tips on how to optimize orientation in your company:
- Regularly collect feedback: Day 7 for first impressions, Day 30 for clarity, and Day 90 for confidence.
- Analyze feedback: Use advanced transcription software to extract recurring problems from onboarding meetings.
- Connect insights to outcomes: Track whether updates based on received feedback shorten time-to-productivity or improve retention rates.
- Add version numbers: When onboarding templates have a history of updates, managers can monitor progress over time.
How AI Can Support an Onboarding Process
What if your onboarding manager could track employee progress without taking a single note? While most professionals manually track effectiveness in spreadsheets, Sembly Notes automatically analyzes growth through conversations. It captures interactions, extracts tasks, assesses learning progress, adaptation, or engagement levels, and generates actionable onboarding insights.
Here is how you can automate tedious tasks with a few clicks:
- Expand the Semblian 2.0 section in the side menu.
- Click My AI Chats.
- Click the New AI Chat button in the upper-right corner.
- Ask Sembly, “Assess [Employee Name] learning progress, [Role Name] adaptation, or engagement levels. Generate a comprehensive performance report with personalized suggestions.”
- Done. Enjoy the result!
Customer vs. Employee Onboarding Templates
The strongest companies design client and employee onboarding experiences as parallel systems. While an employee orientation builds internal capability, a solid customer onboarding template fosters external trust. When both are synchronized, they form a consistent brand experience. The key difference lies in goals: for customers, it’s adoption and loyalty; for employees, it’s productivity and retention.
Let’s take a closer look at the differences and compare the most common onboarding documents:
|
Onboarding aspect
|
Employee onboarding template
|
Customer onboarding template
|
|---|---|---|
|
Goal
|
Increase productivity, integrate company culture, and reduce early employee turnover
|
Shorten time-to-value, increase adoption, and improve customer retention
|
|
Once an offer is accepted
|
Begins post-contract
|
|
|
Deliverables
|
Orientation plan, training schedule, performance milestones, development goals
|
Success plan, implementation checklist, usage dashboard
|
|
Success Metrics
|
Time-to-productivity, 90-day retention, engagement score, and first-project completion
|
Time-to-value, product adoption rate, renewal likelihood, customer satisfaction
|
|
Communication type
|
Scheduled 1:1s, peer introductions, weekly progress reviews
|
Kickoff meeting, regular check-ins, customer feedback sessions, and success reviews
|
|
Pain points
|
Inconsistent manager follow-up, unclear goals, delayed IT setup, and a lack of personalization
|
Missed handoff between sales and success teams, vague timelines, slow ROI realization
|
|
Optimization
|
Improvement through employee feedback, performance data, and onboarding analytics
|
Improvement through usage data, customer interviews, and churn analysis
|
Although these documents serve different audiences, both customer and employee onboarding aim to build confidence, improve retention, and ensure long-term engagement.
Wrapping Up
Treat onboarding as the first conversation your company has with a new hire. Whether it’s an employee meeting their team or a customer discovering your product, the right structure turns that moment into a foundation for lasting connection. The key? Continuously refine your templates and checklists based on feedback, and use AI tools to automate workflows. The results will be visible in no time.
In this article, we’ve explored the best onboarding process examples and learned the steps to build an effective plan from scratch. I hope your next orientation sets the stage for lasting loyalty, engagement, and growth. Good luck!
FAQ
How to create an effective new employee onboarding checklist?
Here are the steps to build a structured onboarding checklist:
- Outline onboarding stages: Include pre-boarding, first week, first month, and 90-day milestones.
- List key tasks for each phase: Start with orientation sessions and move to training goals and manager check-ins.
- Assign ownership and deadlines: Clarify who’s responsible and when each task should be completed.
- Add measurable outcomes: Track time-to-productivity, training completion, and engagement milestones.
- Collect and apply feedback: Update the checklist quarterly based on inputs from employees.
What are the key stages of an employee onboarding plan?
A complete onboarding plan usually includes:
- Preboarding: Paperwork, access setup, welcome communication.
- Orientation: Company culture, policies, team introductions.
- Training & ramp-up: Role-specific learning and mentoring.
- Integration: Independent task ownership and performance milestones.
- Evaluation: Feedback, development goals, and long-term planning.
What is the difference between customer and employee onboarding?
Employee onboarding prepares new hires for success inside the organization, while customer onboarding helps clients or users succeed with your product or service, focusing on adoption, value, and outcomes.
What are the indicators to measure employee onboarding success?
It is recommended to track both quantitative and qualitative indicators:
- Time-to-productivity
- 90-day retention rate
- Employee engagement and feedback scores
- Manager satisfaction and ramp-up quality
- Goal completion rate
What is the best AI tool to automate employee onboarding?
Sembly is the best AI solution that optimizes onboarding workflows by automating time-consuming tasks. It can analyze conversations, extract action items, track progress, and generate comprehensive documents based on the available meeting content.
- Multi-meeting chats
- AI Insights
- AI Artifacts
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