In this instructional video, Matt Vaadi presents a concise, actionable new‑hire onboarding process designed to dramatically improve employee retention, engagement, and productivity. He explains that most new hires form a lasting impression of the organization within the first ten days, and a poorly prepared first day can lead to higher turnover. Vaadi introduces a simple, downloadable new‑hire checklist that covers pre‑start tasks (documentation, equipment, system access), a welcome email sent the week before start date, initial milestones, scheduled one‑on‑one meetings, team introductions, and personal preference collection (e.g., favorite restaurant). He emphasizes automating checklist tasks through an onboarding system and extending onboarding beyond day one to a minimum 90‑day program. Real‑world client results are cited, showing a 35‑40% reduction in turnover when the process is applied. The video concludes with a call to explore additional resources such as employee scavenger hunts and to contact Vaadi for further assistance.
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Hey everybody, hope you're doing well. I've got one simple process you can utilize that will help you to not only improve your employee retention, but also the engagement and productivity of your new hires simply by getting organized before they start. As a matter of fact, most people will decide in the first 10 days whether or not they're going to be looking for a new job in the next 18 months. So we really want to focus on making a great first impression on their first day. And one of the awesome ways to do that is with this very simple new hire checklist. And we've implemented this with clients in the past. We saw one client reduce their turnover by about 35 to 40%. We attribute a lot of that to this process of just being ready. We had heard from so many employees who complained about showing up on their first day and not having their computer ready, not having a desk ready, working out of a conference room, and, you know, all the employees not knowing who they were and just kind of trying to feel their way out for days. And obviously it takes them much longer to ultimately become productive if you're not even ready for them on the first day. So here's a really simple new hire checklist that's going to have everything you need before day one. Uh, like we always say, fail to prepare and prepare to fail. And so this is sort of a general checklist, but there's a version of this on our website and I'll link to it in the comments where you can download this and modify it to meet your needs. But you want to make sure you've got all of their documentation type things done and prepared for them so that they don't show up. One of the things you really don't want is somebody showing up on their first day of work and having to spend a bunch of time completing new hire information. It's just, it's such a waste of time where they could be learning about your mission, your vision, what you guys are doing and where you're going as an organization. Don't waste that very emotional first day on completing the new hire packet, which will take them an hour to read through the handbook and all that. Highly recommend hitting the high notes of the handbook with them, but not necessarily having them sit there and read it all for the first time on their first day. Make sure you have their equipment ready. Make sure you have their, their laptop, their desk, their business cards. If you have their cards ready, getting them set up in the systems that they're going to work in in the first few weeks and have all that prepared for them. This handy checklist will make sure that you can do that. And we've even got in our onboarding system, you can assign these tasks to the appropriate person. So that it's automated. So if you want to get away from just the simple checklist, you can also automate that through our onboarding system as well, which you can check out on the website. I'll put a link to that in the notes also. But you want to get some of these other things on, planning an initial milestone for that teammate so they've got a goal to look forward to even just one right out of the gates. You want to put recurring one-to-one check-ins with the manager on the calendar, and you also want to email their team members and including a little bit of information about them, encouraging them to reach out to the new hire. You want everybody to be prepared for this person when they show up on their first day. And, you know, got a couple other things here, setting up their work area and supplies, getting keys and codes. But this email right here is something I can't suggest enough. The week before the person starts, you want to send them this email. It says, welcome to the team, we're so excited to work with you. This is going to give them some of those details that are going to get rid of some of those first-day jitters and have them prepared to show up on their first day ready to work, excited, less nervous. And also, so we're going to get some of these obvious things out of the way. Who are you looking for? What time should you be there? What— where do you park? What to bring? What's the dress code? But then we're going to ask a couple of get-to-know-you questions. Now, for us, these are really important because we'll ask, what's your favorite restaurant? And then on their anniversary, we'll give them a gift card to their favorite restaurant. So we store some of this in the employee's file so that we can refer back to it later. And we're also just letting them know what to expect and giving them the opportunity to reach out with any questions. And I've also teed up some of my other teammates to reach out to them as well. So they're going to feel very welcome on their first day. So once again, being prepared and ready for somebody to show up on their first day, helping them to get rid of their jitters and be prepped, it is going to help you to not only reduce turnover, but also increase, increase that engagement so that they feel more that they're part of the team. And then also that productivity because you're hitting the ground running and you're getting some of the more tactical things out of the way before they set foot on site. Highly suggest checking out some of our other videos where we talk about employee scavenger hunts and other ways you can make it fun and cool with how you onboard that person past day 1, because onboarding is not a day. Onboarding should take you 90 days at a minimum to get this person up to speed, fully acclimated, socialized inside your organization. So you really want to have a process around that. We've got a ton of resources on our website for doing that. If you have any questions, hit me up. Let me know how I can help. Hope this video was helpful. Leave a comment if it was. Thanks.
