Onboarding is two jobs wearing the same name. One is compliance — the paperwork that has to happen and has a deadline. The other is integration — the part that determines whether the person is still here in a year. Small businesses tend to do the first adequately and the second by accident.

Before day one

  • A signed contract, issued and returned before they start, not on the morning. It should state the employment type, the award and classification if one applies, hours, pay, and probation. See when you need an employment contract.
  • Tax file number declaration and superannuation choice, including the stapled fund process if they do not nominate one.
  • Payroll set up with the correct rate, classification and fund details — the last of which matters far more since Payday Super shortened the window for contributions to land.
  • Access sorted — email, systems, keys, whatever they need to do anything at all on the first morning.

Day one

  • The Fair Work Information Statement, and the Casual Employment Information Statement if they are casual. This is a legal obligation, not a nicety.
  • A work health and safety induction appropriate to the work — hazards, emergency procedures, who to report to.
  • Your policies, given properly rather than emailed as an attachment nobody opens. Record that they were provided.
  • Somewhere to sit, someone to talk to, and something to do. Obvious, and skipped constantly.

The first week

The goal is a small, complete win. Something they finish, that matters, that someone thanks them for. New starters who spend a week reading documentation and shadowing form an early view that they are an overhead rather than a contributor, and that view is surprisingly durable.

Also: name who they should ask. In a small business “just ask anyone” means asking nobody, because a new person will not interrupt someone who looks busy. Nominate a specific person whose job it explicitly is to be interrupted.

Weeks two to four

  • A check-in at the end of week one and week four. Short, two-way, and actually held. These are the conversations where you find out that the role is not what they expected, while it is still cheap to fix.
  • Confirm the expectations in writing. What does success at three months look like? If you cannot answer that, neither can they.
  • Test the payroll. Check the first pay slip yourself against the award. First-pay errors are extremely common and set an unhelpful tone.

Why this is worth the effort

Replacing someone costs a multiple of their monthly salary once you count advertising, your time, lost productivity and the ramp-up of the next person. Most early departures are not about pay — they are about someone concluding in the first fortnight that the role is not what they were told, or that nobody is paying attention to them.

A written onboarding checklist takes an hour to build and removes most of that risk. It also makes the compliance items impossible to forget, which is the part that gets expensive in a different way.

If you are hiring for the first time, or hiring after a long gap, getting the contract, classification and induction right at the outset is far easier than correcting it later. That is exactly what an HR Setup engagement is for.