How To Create An HR Process Checklist
Map the Journey: An HR checklist acts as a roadmap to ensure all tasks, from hiring to offboarding, are completed without anything being overlooked.
Stay Organized: A well-designed HR process checklist helps manage and streamline various HR activities, avoiding chaos and ensuring consistency.
Flexible Frameworks: The article guides how to create an adaptable HR process checklist that can be tailored to any specific HR task, making it versatile and useful.
There’s no shortage of tasks for HR to get lost in. An HR process checklist is your roadmap to ensuring nothing falls through the cracks, from hiring to offboarding.
In this article, I’m going to break down how you can cultivate an HR process checklist for any process you have to undergo.
What Is An HR Process Checklist?
An HR process checklist is a structured list of tasks and procedures that HR professionals use to manage their responsibilities efficiently. It serves as a guide to help HR teams complete their duties systematically, ensuring that all necessary steps are followed in various HR processes.
Whether you’re onboarding new employees or conducting performance reviews, an HR process checklist gives you a path toward consistency and compliance across the board and will serve as a nice complement to your HR software, even if it automates some of this work.
Why Are HR Checklists Essential?
HR checklists are more than just to-do lists. They’re essential for a few reasons:
- Improved Efficiency: HR checklists are particularly important when managing repetitive tasks like payroll processing or new hire paperwork.
- Consistency: A checklist ensures that every HR task is handled the same way each time, which helps you to maintain fairness and avoid errors.
- Compliance: A checklist helps ensure that all necessary steps are followed, reducing the risk of non-compliance and potential legal issues.
Elements Of An HR Process Checklist
A comprehensive HR process checklist should cover all the critical areas of HR operations. Below are the essential elements that should be included:
Hiring and recruitment
The hiring process is the foundation of building a great team. But it’s arguably one of the more complex processes you’ll go through, with more stakeholders and more exposure to the world outside of your organization than the rest of these processes.
A survey from CareerPlug of job seekers showed that the candidate experience not only informed the decision to take a job for the vast majority of job seekers, but more than half indicated that they’ve turned down a job due to a negative experience with a potential employer.
One thing that could cause a negative experience is missing key steps in a healthy recruitment process. Your checklist should include the necessary steps for each of the following tasks:
- Job postings: Drafting job descriptions that account for your recruiting SEO strategy, are accurate, and posting them on relevant platforms.
- Screening resumes: Reviewing applications and shortlisting candidates.
- Interviews: Scheduling and conducting interviews, followed by assessments.
- Follow-ups: Communication during each step of the process to set expectations and lay out the next steps.
- Candidate selection: Making final decisions and extending job offers.
Onboarding
Onboarding is your method of integrating new hires into the company culture and setting them up for success. It’s the first experience someone who joins your organization will have as an employee and sets the tone for everything that comes next. Optimizing your onboarding should be a constant goal for this reason.
Your onboarding checklist should cover:
- Paperwork completion: Ensuring all legal documents, such as contracts and tax forms, are signed.
- Introduction to team: Arranging meetings with team members and other key personnel.
- Training: Setting up initial training sessions and providing access to necessary tools and systems.
- Follow-up: Scheduling check-ins to address any questions or concerns during the first few months.
Employee training and development
Ongoing training helps with driving employee growth and retention and this has been the case for some time. Back in 2018, EdAssist completed a survey that showed 60% of respondents indicated they would choose a job with strong professional development opportunities and 53% said being given access to training and development entices them to stay at a job longer.
Very little has changed since then, with more than half of Gen Z employees indicating that development opportunities are important to them.
A good HR checklist for training and development includes detailed steps for:
- Identifying training needs: Assessing skills gaps and identifying necessary training.
- Scheduling training: Organizing in-house or external training sessions.
- Tracking progress: Monitoring completion of training programs and evaluating their effectiveness.
- Career development plans: Using employee skill assessments to develop individualized plans for career progression.
Performance management
Performance management is key to fostering a productive workforce, but it’s also an important factor in driving employee satisfaction. Research from Reflektive shows that less than 30% of managers do performance check-ins with their direct reports on a weekly basis. Directly related to that, 61% of employers say that a lack of regular feedback impedes employee performance.
To cultivate regular feedback loops, your checklist should include:
- Setting objectives: Establishing clear performance goals for employees.
- Conducting reviews: Preparing for and conducting performance reviews regularly.
- Feedback and improvement plans: Providing constructive feedback and developing improvement plans if necessary.
- Documentation: Keeping records of performance evaluations and any disciplinary actions.
Offboarding
Offboarding is just as important as onboarding, ensuring that employee departures are handled professionally. With 60,000 jobs cut in the tech industry alone in 2024, the importance of handling layoffs has never been more obvious for all to see.
Your checklist should cover:
- Exit interviews: This is only pertinent in the case of someone quitting, but conducting interviews to gather feedback and understand the reasons for departure is helpful in understanding what the company could be doing better.
- Return of company property: Ensuring all company property is returned, such as laptops or ID cards.
- Final payroll processing: Settling any outstanding payments, including unused vacation days.
- Deactivating accounts: Revoking access to company systems and networks.
How to Create an HR Process Checklist
Okay, now you see the kinds of processes you’re looking to outline in a checklist. It’s time to actually create one as part of your HR planning efforts.
Here’s how you get started:
Brainstorming and collaboration
Begin by gathering input from your HR team and other stakeholders. This collaborative approach will help you create a checklist that is comprehensive and covers all necessary tasks.
For example, involve department heads when creating a hiring checklist to include role-specific requirements. No matter how well you think you know a role, you don’t know what new demands there might be from the team for the next engineer they want to hire or what may have changed in the world of content design since you last hired for the position.
This is also a good time to go back and review how efficiently you were able to fill a role or related role previously. If your performance left something to be desired, it's a good time to brainstorm with the team how you might reposition a job’s requirements or where you’re placing the job ad.
Organizing tasks by priority
Not all HR tasks are of equal importance. Prioritize tasks based on urgency and impact. For instance, ensuring legal compliance in employee contracts might take precedence over organizing team-building activities.
On the other hand, if you’ve got a team that isn’t working well together ahead of a critical project, you might want to make sure you get everyone pulling in the same direction before you hire new people or kick off a project that is sabotaged by internal strife.
Prioritization makes tasks make sense with the bigger picture of a project, initiative, or recruitment push.
Level of detail
Provide clear, detailed instructions for each task to avoid ambiguity. For example, instead of simply noting “Conduct interviews,” specify steps such as “Prepare interview questions,” “Coordinate with panel members,” and “Follow up with candidates.”
Regular updates and reviews
HR processes evolve, and so should your checklists. Regularly review and update your checklist to reflect any changes in company policies, legal requirements, or industry best practices. Set a schedule for these reviews, such as quarterly or biannually.
Sample HR Process Checklist Templates
Here are some sample HR process checklist templates that you can customize to suit your organization’s needs:
Recruiting and hiring checklist
- Create Job Description
- Define the job role and responsibilities.
- Collaborate with the hiring manager to specify the qualifications and experience required.
- Outline key performance indicators (KPIs) for the role.
- Post Job Opening
- Select job boards and platforms (LinkedIn, Indeed, company website).
- Customize the job posting for each platform and optimize for SEO.
- Set an application deadline and track responses.
- Review Applications
- Filter applications based on required qualifications.
- Shortlist candidates who meet the minimum criteria.
- Prepare a scoring system for evaluating candidates.
- Schedule and Conduct Interviews
- Coordinate with interview panel members to select dates and times.
- Prepare a list of standardized interview questions.
- Conduct initial phone screens, followed by in-person or video interviews.
- Collect feedback from all interviewers.
- Extend Job Offer
- Draft the job offer letter, including salary, benefits, and start date.
- Send the offer letter to the selected candidate.
- Follow up for confirmation and discuss any counteroffers or negotiations.
- Prepare Employment Contract
- Draft the employment contract with all legal requirements.
- Include clauses on confidentiality, non-compete, and termination.
- Arrange for the candidate’s signature and retain a copy for records.
Check out an example of how you might design a checklist to feature these sort of tasks by looking at our New Hire Checklist Template.
Time off management checklist
- Track Employee Leave Requests
- Provide employees with a standardized leave request form.
- Log all requests in an HR management system.
- Verify the type of leave (e.g., vacation, sick leave, parental leave).
- Approve/Deny Leave Requests
- Check available leave balances and departmental coverage.
- Approve or deny the leave request based on policies.
- Notify the employee of the decision in writing.
- Update Payroll Records
- Adjust payroll to reflect the approved leave.
- Deduct the correct number of leave days from the employee’s balance.
- Ensure any unpaid leave is accurately processed.
- Monitor Leave Balances
- Regularly review leave balances for each employee.
- Communicate with employees who are nearing their leave limits.
- Ensure compliance with any legal requirements regarding leave accrual and usage.
- Communicate Leave Policies
- Provide employees with updated leave policies annually.
- Offer training sessions or Q&A sessions on leave management.
- Make leave policies easily accessible via the company intranet or HR portal.
Performance management checklist
- Set Performance Goals
- Collaborate with employees to set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals.
- Document the goals and share them with employees.
- Align individual goals with departmental and organizational objectives.
- Conduct Mid-Year Review
- Schedule mid-year review meetings with each employee.
- Use performance data and feedback collected throughout the year.
- Discuss progress toward goals and identify any roadblocks.
- Provide Feedback
- Offer constructive feedback, focusing on strengths and areas for improvement.
- Use specific examples to illustrate points.
- Develop a plan for improvement, if necessary, and provide resources.
- Develop Improvement Plan (if needed)
- Identify specific actions and timelines for improvement.
- Assign a mentor or coach to support the employee.
- Schedule follow-up meetings to monitor progress.
- Document Review Outcomes
- Record the discussion and outcomes of the performance review.
- Have both the manager and employee sign off on the review document.
- Store the document securely in the employee’s HR file.
Best Practices For Using HR Process Checklists
To ensure your HR checklists are effective, follow these best practices:
Assign responsibilities
Clearly assign tasks to specific team members and hold folks accountable. For example, designate one HR team member to manage onboarding, while another handles performance reviews. Giving people an area to specialize in ensures tasks are completed efficiently and thoroughly.
Track progress
Implement a system to track the completion of checklist tasks. Whether you use a simple spreadsheet or an HR software tool, tracking progress helps ensure deadlines are met and nothing is overlooked.
Leverage technology
Use HR software and tools to manage and automate checklist tasks. Tools like Trello or Asana can help organize and track progress, while specialized HR software like BambooHR or Workday can automate many HR tasks, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
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