Employee onboarding checklist for the first 90 days

Most onboarding is a laptop, a login and a calendar full of introductions. The new hire is busy for two weeks and then, quietly, unsure what they’re actually accountable for. It’s usually month three before anyone finds out whether the hire is working — and by then a lot of goodwill has been spent.

Good onboarding is shorter on welcome and longer on clarity. By the end of their first 90 days, a new team member should know what their seat owns, own real numbers, and be pulling their weight in the team’s weekly meeting.

Before day one

The work that makes onboarding go well happens before the person arrives.

• Write the role. If the seat doesn’t have a written role description — purpose, responsibilities, metrics, decisions — write it now. See define roles and responsibilities.
• Name an onboarding owner. Usually the hiring manager. One person is accountable for the new hire being productive at 90 days.
• Invite them to Clarion. An admin goes to Settings → Team & Permissions, clicks Invite Member, enters their email, picks an access role (most employees are Full Access) and the teams they’ll join, then clicks Send Invite. Team membership decides which teams’ metrics, milestones and meetings they see. See invite your team.
• Set up the onboarding milestone (below), so the plan exists before the person does.

Make onboarding a milestone

Treat each new hire’s first 90 days as a milestone on the team they’re joining. It gives onboarding a single owner, a due date, a definition of done and a weekly status — the same discipline the team uses for its other important work.

• Title: “Onboard Priya — Customer Success Lead”
• Assignee: the hiring manager
• Due Date: day 90
• Definition of done: “Priya owns the onboarding and renewal metrics, has run two customer kick-offs solo, and has led one challenge to resolution in the weekly sync.”

Then add subtasks with due dates for the steps. Each subtask becomes a linked action item, assigned to the milestone owner to start with. Reassign the ones the new hire should do themselves on the Action Items page, and they’ll appear in their list; ticking one off in either place updates both. See create a milestone and add milestone subtasks.

Status updates come for free: the milestone shows up in the team’s weekly sync, and the manager says on track or off track like any other milestone.

An onboarding checklist for the first 90 days

Use these as your subtasks, adjusted for the role.

Week 1 — context

• Read the vision board and the team’s current milestones and metrics.
• Read the role description and the core process articles for the team.
• Meet each person they’ll work with closely, with a purpose for each meeting.
• Attend the team’s weekly sync as an observer.
• Welcome post on the team’s Hub (by the manager).

Weeks 2–4 — first ownership

• Take ownership of one or two metrics from the role description, and start reporting them in the sync.
• Shadow the core processes their seat runs, then do them with support.
• Add their first challenge or action item in the weekly sync.

Weeks 5–8 — real accountability

• Run the seat’s core processes unaided.
• Own all the metrics in the role description.
• Suggest one improvement to a process article based on what they’ve learned.

Weeks 9–12 — full seat

• Own a quarterly milestone of their own for next quarter.
• 90-day review with the manager: what’s working, what isn’t, whether the role description needs to change.

The knowledge they need, in one place

New hires ask the same questions every time. Answer them once, in writing.

• Process docs in the knowledgebase — how the team actually does its core work. Process articles can include a video link (YouTube, Vimeo or Loom), which is often the fastest way to show a workflow.
• An onboarding article per team — who’s who, which meetings matter, where things live, the vocabulary.
• Files and templates in assets, so the new hire finds the current version rather than an old attachment.
• The Hub for context. The team’s Hub holds announcements, pinned notes and the summaries of past syncs. Scrolling back a few weeks is a quick way to learn what the team has been dealing with. See post to the Hub.

If a new hire can’t follow an article, that’s a problem with the article. Ask them to note what was missing — new hires are the best test your documentation will get. See share company knowledge.

Measuring onboarding

If onboarding matters, measure it. A people team scorecard might include:

Add them on the people team’s Metrics page with Add Metric, ticking Inverted metric for the ones where lower is better.

Common mistakes

• Introductions instead of ownership. Meeting everyone isn’t onboarding. Owning something is.
• No written role. Without one, the new hire guesses what success looks like, and so does the manager.
• Waiting too long to give them a number. Owning a metric in week two or three builds confidence and visibility fast.
• Onboarding that lives in someone’s head. If it’s not a milestone with subtasks, the second hire gets a worse onboarding than the first.
• Skipping the 90-day review. It’s the cheapest moment to fix a role or a fit problem.

New hires can start with prepare for your sync and keep your metrics current.