An employee onboarding checklist in SharePoint
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Onboarding fails in the same way everywhere: it is not one team's process. HR does the contract, IT does the account and the laptop, the manager does the introductions and the first project — and because no single person can see the whole thing, something is always missed on someone's first day.
The fix is not a better email template. It is one shared list where every task has an owner, a due date and a visible state. Describe it to Sharelio, the AI platform for building SharePoint tools: “an onboarding checklist with new starter, task, owner team, due date and status, grouped by starter and showing overdue first”.
Before building anything, settle one decision — the data shape — because getting it wrong is what makes these tools quietly useless.
The decision that determines everything: one row per what?
| One row per starter | One row per task | |
|---|---|---|
| Looks like | A column per checklist item | A task, an owner, a due date, a status |
| Adding a step later | A new column, on every past row | A new row |
| Who owns each step | Not expressible | A column |
| Due dates per step | Not expressible | A column |
| "What is overdue across everyone?" | Impossible | A filtered view |
One row per task. The other shape is the intuitive one — it looks like the spreadsheet everyone pictures — and it collapses the moment you want to know who owes what. If you take one thing from this page, take this.
The three routes
| Route | Cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| List with a grouped, formatted view | €0 | Grouping by starter, colour by status, overdue highlighted. Genuinely enough for a few hires a month. |
| List plus a component | Free plan, then flat per tenant | The same on the HR page, plus counts of what is outstanding and a view per owning team |
| Add Power Automate | €0 with standard connectors | Task rows generated automatically from a template when a starter is added, plus reminders |
That third row is where onboarding gets genuinely good, and it stacks with either of the first two rather than replacing them. A flow that copies a task template into the list every time a starter is created removes the step that is actually forgotten: creating the checklist.
What makes it stick
- Due dates relative to the start date, not absolute. "Day −5: order laptop" survives a delayed start; "14 March" does not.
- An owning team, not a named person. People are on holiday. Teams are not.
- Put the view where each team already works. IT should see their tasks on the IT page, not be asked to visit an HR page.
- Keep offboarding in the same list with a process column. It is the same shape, it is the one people forget, and it is the one with security consequences.
That last point is worth acting on. Onboarding failures are embarrassing; offboarding failures are an accounts-still-active incident in an audit.
Frequently asked questions
Can tasks be created automatically for each new starter?
Yes, with a Power Automate flow using standard connectors, so at no extra licence cost. Keep a template list of tasks with relative day offsets; when a starter is added, the flow copies them in and calculates due dates from the start date. This is the highest-value automation in the whole tool.
Should this be one list or one per department?
One list, with an owning-team column. Separate lists means nobody can answer "is this person ready to start?" without opening three of them — which is the exact failure you are trying to fix. Give each team a filtered view instead.
How do we handle confidential steps like salary or references?
Keep them out of the shared list. A checklist that everyone can see is what makes it work, so anything only HR should see belongs in a separate, restricted list. Trying to hide individual rows with item-level permissions is technically possible and administratively miserable.
Is Microsoft Planner or To Do better for this?
Planner suits a single team's board and is good at it. It is weaker here because onboarding spans teams and you want one place to see everything, plus a record you can report on months later. A list gives you cross-team visibility, filtered views per team and history; Planner gives you a nicer board for one of those teams.