New-Hire Onboarding Checklist: 6 Must-Haves for Accounting Firms
- Assemble a cross-functional onboarding team before you extend an offer, not after a new hire’s first day.
- Build separate onboarding steps for in-office, hybrid, and remote hires; a one-size-fits-all plan leaves gaps.
- A complete new hire checklist covers six stages: pre-onboarding, a welcome letter, orientation, an engaged onboarding team, a 30-60-90-day plan, and regular check-ins.
- Strong onboarding programs correlate with higher new hire retention and faster productivity gains.
- New hires consistently want the same things in their first ninety days: clarity on their role, a named point of contact, and a sense of how their work connects to the firm’s goals.
Every accounting firm eventually asks the same question: why do some new hires settle in and stay, while others are gone within a few months?
Often, the answer traces back to onboarding. In a Gallup report on onboarding, only 12% of employees think their company does a great job welcoming new hires, and according to Zippia, 17% of employees leave between their first week and their third month on the job. For accounting firms competing for a shrinking pool of talent, a weak onboarding process is an expensive way to lose the people you just spent months recruiting.
This guide is for firm owners, managing partners, and operations leads who are building or refreshing a new-hire onboarding process. We will cover what onboarding actually includes, how to staff an onboarding team, how to adjust your plan for in-office, hybrid, and remote employees, and a six-part new-hire checklist you can implement this quarter.
What Is New-Hire Onboarding?
New-hire onboarding is the structured process of welcoming a new employee to your firm, introducing them to your firm’s mission and values, and helping them understand their role and responsibilities. It typically starts before a new hire’s first day and continues through their first ninety days on the job. Good onboarding is planned, not improvised on day one.
Why New Hire Onboarding Matters
A weak onboarding process does more than create an awkward first week. It shows up in your firm’s turnover, productivity, and hiring costs.
Consider what’s at stake:
- The average cost to train a new employee at a small company runs to $1,433 per employee, according to Training magazine’s Training Industry Report. Every early departure means paying that cost again.
- Firms with a strong onboarding process see measurably higher new hire retention and faster time to productivity than firms without one, according to a widely cited Brandon Hall Group study.
- Research from BambooHR has found that roughly a third of new hires leave a job within their first six months, with most of those departures happening in the first three months.
Combine those numbers with an accounting profession already short on talent, and a thin onboarding process becomes a competitive disadvantage. Firms that get this right keep more of the people they hire.
Build Your Onboarding Team First
Before you create an onboarding plan, put together the team that will run it. Onboarding shouldn’t fall to one manager juggling it alongside everything else.
A dedicated onboarding team gives you three advantages:
- Diverse perspectives. No two roles at your firm are managed the same way. A team drawn from different departments helps your onboarding plan reflect that.
- Shared responsibility. Distributing the work across a team means onboarding does not depend on any single person’s schedule or bandwidth.
- Consistency. A dedicated team helps every new hire get the same quality of onboarding, regardless of who is running it that week.
When you choose who sits on this team, look for a few specific traits: strong organizational skills and attention to detail, clear and timely communication, patience, and a genuine, demonstrated understanding of your firm’s culture. Someone who is disorganized or impatient with questions will undercut the plan you’re trying to build, no matter how good the plan is on paper.
Building an onboarding team from scratch?
The Rightworks Community connects you with firm leaders working through the same staffing and culture questions, so you don’t have to solve this alone.
Adapt Onboarding to Your Work Environment
How you onboard a new hire depends heavily on where they’ll be working. A single plan rarely fits in-office, hybrid, and remote employees equally well.
In-Office Onboarding
For staff working entirely on-site, focus on the physical experience of the first day. Give a tour of the office, including common areas and meeting rooms. Schedule in-person introductions with the team members and key personnel your new hire will work most closely with. Confirm their workstation and technology are fully set up before they arrive; nothing undercuts a first day faster than a new hire who cannot log in.
Hybrid Onboarding
Hybrid onboarding needs clear expectations up front. Specify which days your new hire is expected to be in the office and which days they can work remotely. Make sure they have both the physical setup and the cloud-based tools to do their job from either location. Plan a mix of in-person and virtual meetings so they build relationships with the full team, not just whoever happens to be in the office on their scheduled days.
Remote Onboarding
Fully remote hires need a deliberate substitute for the hallway conversations that in-office hires pick up naturally. Start with a virtual orientation and one-on-one meetings in the first few days to help them get to know their team. Then keep a regular check-in cadence; remote new hires who go quiet for a week can start to feel disconnected fast.
The New Hire Onboarding Checklist: 6 Must-Haves
Once your team is in place and you’ve accounted for where your new hire will work, use this six-part checklist to build out the plan itself.
1. Create a pre-onboarding process
Before a new hire’s first day, confirm what equipment they’ll need, who is responsible for ordering and delivering it, and whether any welcome materials should go out ahead of time. Decide who needs to meet with the new employee during their first week, and make sure those meetings are on the calendar before they start. A little preparation here goes a long way toward a smooth first day.
2. Send a welcome letter
As soon as an offer is accepted, send a welcome email covering the start date and time, office location if applicable, their manager’s name and contact information, any documents they need to bring, and when to expect their equipment if they’re remote. Let your team know a new hire is joining, and encourage them to introduce themselves early.
3. Schedule an orientation
Whether your new hire works in the office or remotely, their first day should include meetings with managers and executives to cover your firm’s mission and values, a session with HR to review policies and paperwork, and a clear rundown of what’s expected of them and how their performance will be measured.
4. Engage the onboarding team
This is where the team you assembled earlier goes to work. They should check in with the new hire regularly, schedule any process or technology training, make introductions across the firm, and help the new hire start building relationships with the team.
5. Define a 30-60-90-day plan
New hires perform best when they know exactly what’s expected of them in their first ninety days. Build a plan broken into 30-day increments, each with its own focus, priorities, and learning and performance goals. Revisit the plan at each 30-day mark to adjust goals and gather feedback on how onboarding is going.
6. Communicate and check in often
Don’t onboard a new hire and then go quiet. Check in weekly for the first ninety days, then move to every other week or monthly after that. Use these check-ins to catch small issues early, offer feedback, and ask for feedback in return. Consistent communication is what keeps an onboarding plan from becoming a one-time event instead of an ongoing process.
What New Hires Want to Know
Across most new hire feedback, the same questions come up again and again, regardless of role or work environment. New hires want to know what success looks like in their first ninety days, who to go to with questions, how their role fits into the firm’s broader goals, and what tools and resources they’ll have access to. A new hire checklist that answers these questions directly, rather than leaving a new employee to figure them out, is what separates a firm’s onboarding process that retains people from one that doesn’t.
If your firm is also working on the recruiting side of this equation, our guide to the hiring process itself covers how to find the right candidate before onboarding ever begins, and our guide to navigating the accounting talent crisis covers the broader staffing strategy behind both.
Put Your New Hire Onboarding Checklist to Work
A strong new hire onboarding process is not a nice-to-have. It’s one of the most direct levers a firm has to reduce turnover, protect its investment in recruiting, and help new employees become productive team members faster. Start by assembling your onboarding team, adapt your plan to how and where your new hires actually work, and build out the six-part checklist above one piece at a time. None of this needs to happen all at once, but each piece you put in place will show up in how long your new hires stay.
For more support building out your firm’s staffing strategy, connect with peers facing the same challenges in the Rightworks Community.
New Hire Onboarding FAQ
What should a new hire onboarding checklist include?
A complete new-hire checklist covers pre-onboarding logistics, a welcome letter, a first-day orientation, an engaged onboarding team, a 30-60-90-day plan, and regular check-ins through at least the first 90 days. Skipping any one of these tends to show up later as confusion, disengagement, or early turnover.
How long should employee onboarding last?
Onboarding should extend through at least a new hire’s first ninety days, not just their first week. Most 30-60-90-day plans are built around this timeline because it takes roughly that long for a new hire to reach full productivity and for a firm to see whether the fit is working.
How is onboarding different for remote employees?
Remote onboarding needs to recreate the connections an in-office hire builds naturally and deliberately. That means a virtual orientation, early one-on-one meetings, reliable access to a cloud-based work environment, and a consistent check-in schedule so a remote new hire doesn’t start to feel isolated.
What do new hires want to know in their first week?
New hires most often want clarity on what’s expected of them, who their main point of contact is for questions, and how their work connects to the firm’s broader goals. A good onboarding plan answers these directly instead of leaving a new employee to piece them together.
Why does new hire onboarding affect retention?
Onboarding sets the tone for a new hire’s entire experience at your firm. A disorganized or rushed first few weeks signals that the firm may not be organized elsewhere either, which is part of why weak onboarding correlates with higher early turnover, particularly in the first three to six months.
