TL;DR

• IT onboarding is how you set up every piece of technology your new hire needs to do their job, from hardware and software to access permissions and security training.
• Without a structured checklist, experiences vary from hire to hire and security faults go unnoticed until issues pop up.
• The checklist can be broken into four phases: pre-arrival, day one, week one, and month one, with a defined owner for every task.
• Role-based provisioning profiles are essential to avoid waste and under-provisioning.
• Onboarding and offboarding are two sides of the same process, and building both at the same time prevents access from lingering long after someone leaves.
• Workwize automates the entire hardware side of IT onboarding, including procuring, configuring, and delivering MDM-enrolled devices directly to new hires, wherever they are, so employees are ready to work from day one without IT lifting a finger.

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“Onboarding is a magic moment when new employees decide to stay engaged or become disengaged. It offers an imprinting window when you can make an impression that stays with new employees for the duration of their careers.”

- Amy Hirsh Robinson, Principal of The Interchange Group, LA (source)

That magic moment that Robinson speaks of? Well, most organizations are fumbling it.

Most of the time, a new hire shows up with an unconfigured laptop and no email. Credentials are missing, and the employee is sitting idle, already questioning their decision.

The fact is, only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job of onboarding. The other 88% walk into something that falls short.

The cost of getting it wrong goes beyond a bad first impression. For employees, a broken onboarding experience erodes confidence and trust before any real work begins. For employers, it hits three areas that matter most: security, monetary cost, and experience.

Misconfigured access creates vulnerabilities. Lost productivity during ramp-up drains budgets. And disengaged new hires leave, taking with them the $4,700 average cost per hire that it took to bring them in.

On the flip side, organizations with strong onboarding see significant improvements in new-hire retention and productivity.

This article gives you the exact IT onboarding checklist to make that happen phase by phase, role by role, with clear owners for every task.