Employee Onboarding Checklist: What to Include Before a First Route

An employee onboarding checklist is the list of things that must be collected, issued, trained and signed before a new hire works unsupervised. Its purpose is narrow and worth stating plainly: it stops you finding out on a Tuesday, from the side of a road, that something was missed.

Most checklist templates available online are built for an office hire. They cover the desk, the email account and the org chart introduction, and they stop. They do not cover a licence check against the vehicle class the person will actually drive, or whether the scanner login works away from your wifi, or who the new hire calls when a chiller reads wrong at a customer’s back door.

This is the version for a business that moves its own goods. It is organised by when each item has to happen rather than by department, because timing is what actually goes wrong. For the reasoning behind the sequence, the step-by-step employee onboarding process from offer to day 90 explains what each stage is for; this page is the list itself.

The Bottom Line

• The checklist exists to prevent one specific failure: someone working alone without something they needed.
• Organise it by timing (before day one, day one, first week, first 90 days) rather than by category. Items fail because they happened late, not because they were filed wrong.
• Delivery roles add five items an office checklist never has: licence verification, vehicle familiarity, product handling, site access rules, and a failure protocol.
• Every item needs a named owner and a date. An item owned by “us” is owned by nobody.
• Nothing gets signed off as complete because it was arranged. It is complete when it has been tested.

What an employee onboarding checklist should cover

Four things, in this order of importance.

• Legal and compliance items. Employment eligibility, tax forms, licence and insurance verification, safety acknowledgements. These have consequences if missed and are not negotiable at any team size.
• Practical readiness. Equipment, access, logins, keys, uniform. This is where most real-world failures live, because each item is individually trivial and collectively easy to lose track of.
• Knowledge transfer. Product handling, route knowledge, customer-site rules, what to do when things go wrong.
• Human integration. Introductions, a named buddy, scheduled check-ins.

A checklist that only covers the first category is a compliance file, not an onboarding checklist. One that covers all four but assigns no owners is a wish list. Every line below should have a name and a date beside it.

The preboarding checklist: everything before day one

This section carries the highest return. Each item completed here is an item not consuming the first morning, and almost all of it can be done remotely.

Send and collect:

• Signed offer letter or employment contract.
• Tax withholding forms. In the US that is the federal W-4 plus any state equivalent.
• Employment eligibility verification. In the US, Form I-9. Section 2 requires document examination, which is the part that gets awkward when your hire will never visit an office.
• Bank details for direct deposit.
• Emergency contact details.
• Any required certifications, such as food handling, forklift or first aid, with a copy on file.

Verify and record:

• Driving licence, checked against the vehicle class they will actually drive. Record the expiry date somewhere that will alert you.
• Driving record check, where your insurance requires one.
• Confirmation that your vehicle insurance covers the new driver, completed before they touch a vehicle.
• Right to work documentation as your jurisdiction requires.

Arrange:

• Uniform and safety footwear in the correct size, ordered with lead time.
• Phone, scanner or handheld device allocated.
• Fuel card or expense method issued.
• Payroll record created.
• App accounts created, not just requested.
• Week one route plan decided, and the buddy named and told.

Communicate:

• A first-day message covering start time, where to park, which door, who to ask for, what to bring, what to wear.
• One contact message per week during any gap longer than a fortnight between offer and start date.

If preboarding is the part you automate, it is also the part where tooling pays back first, since it is almost entirely document collection and reminders. What onboarding software does for a small delivery team, and when a spreadsheet still beats it covers that decision.

The day one checklist

Day one is for people and access, not paperwork. If the section above was done, this is achievable in a morning.

The access row is the one to be strict about. “Requested” is not “done”. A login is complete when the new hire has personally opened it on the device they will use, away from your desk. Untested access is the most common cause of a bad day three.

Equipment to issue before a first shift

Issue against a written list and record what went out, because it also becomes your return list when someone leaves.

• Uniform, correct size, enough sets for a working week.
• Safety footwear and any weather gear the role actually calls for.
• Phone or handheld device, charged, with the route and scanning apps installed and logged in.
• Vehicle keys and, where relevant, a fuel card with the PIN delivered separately.
• Building, yard or gate access method.
• Load restraints, trolley, straps, or whatever your goods require.
• Printed route notes and a customer contact list that works when the phone does not.
• A failure card for the cab: who to call when nobody answers, when refrigeration reads wrong, when an account refuses a delivery, when the vehicle will not start.

That last item takes ten minutes to write once and removes a large share of first-month panic calls. It is the highest-value piece of paper on this list.

Training to complete before a first unsupervised route

This is the section that separates a delivery onboarding checklist from a generic one. None of these should be outstanding when someone first works alone.

• Vehicle familiarity. The specific van: lift gate operation, load securing, daily checks, where the spare and the jack are.
• Daily vehicle inspection. Performed by them, once, observed.
• Product handling rules. Temperature holds, stacking, fragile goods and allergen separation, taught at the bench rather than from a document.
• Loading sequence. Loading in reverse drop order, and why it matters when drop eleven is at the back.
• Proof of delivery. Scanning, signature capture, photo requirements, and what to do when the app fails offline.
• Customer-site rules. Which accounts have a dock, which need a buzzer, which refuse deliveries after a certain hour, which have a dog.
• Escalation protocol. Walked through, out loud, with the failure card in hand.
• Incident procedure. What happens after a collision, an injury or a damaged load, and who they call first.

A useful test before signing this section off: ask them to describe what they would do if nobody answers at a drop and the goods are chilled. If the answer is confident and correct, the training landed.

First week and 90-day checklist items

Days two to five:

• Difficulty escalates daily: ride along, then handle stops, then drive with the buddy present, then a short solo route.
• A ten-minute debrief at the end of each day.
• Any deferred training items closed.
• An end-of-week conversation: what was confusing, what took longer than expected.

Day 30:

• Performance expectations confirmed in numbers.
• Outstanding certifications or training closed.
• Equipment gaps identified and filled.
• Direct question asked: where was the job different from what you expected?

Day 60:

• Scope widened to a second route type, awkward accounts and peak-day shifts.
• Any qualification expiry dates entered into whatever will remind you.

Day 90:

• Two-way review against the day 30 expectations.
• Onboarding explicitly closed, in words, so they know they are no longer being assessed.

Book the day 30, 60 and 90 items into a calendar during preboarding. The integration stage fails through drift rather than disagreement, and a calendar entry is the whole remedy. The practices that make these check-ins worth having are covered in the onboarding habits that actually keep new hires past month three.

How to sign off a checklist so it means something

Three rules keep a checklist honest.

• One named owner per line. Not a department, not “us”. A person who can be asked.
• A date beside every item, set before the hire starts rather than filled in afterwards.
• Tested, not arranged. Access is complete when it has been used. Training is complete when it has been demonstrated back to you. Equipment is complete when it is in their hands.

Keep the completed checklist. It is your record that safety briefings were delivered and licences verified, and it is the document you will want if anything is ever questioned. Store it with the expiry dates, since licences and certifications are the items most likely to lapse without anyone noticing.

Frequently asked questions

What should be included in an employee onboarding checklist?

Four groups: legal and compliance items (employment eligibility, tax forms, licence and insurance verification, safety sign-off), practical readiness (equipment, access, logins, uniform), knowledge transfer (product handling, route and customer knowledge, failure protocol), and human integration (introductions, a named buddy, scheduled check-ins). Organise them by when they must happen rather than by category.

What paperwork does a new employee need to complete?

In the US, typically Form I-9 for employment eligibility, a federal W-4 plus any state withholding equivalent, direct deposit details, emergency contacts, and signed acknowledgement of the handbook and safety policies. Driving roles add licence verification, insurance confirmation, and a driving record check where your insurer requires one. Requirements differ by jurisdiction, so confirm against your own before relying on any published list.

What is the difference between a preboarding and an onboarding checklist?

Preboarding covers everything between offer acceptance and the first day: documents, equipment ordering, account creation, the first-day message. Onboarding covers the first day onward. Preboarding is a subsection of the onboarding checklist, and it is the one with the highest payoff, because every item moved into it is an item not consuming day one.

How detailed should an onboarding checklist be for a small business?

Detailed enough that someone else could run it if you were away, which usually means one to two pages. The value is not thoroughness for its own sake; it is that the fourth hire gets the same treatment as the first, by which point you will not remember what you did the first time.

What do I add to a standard checklist for delivery drivers?

Five items a generic template will not have: licence verification against the vehicle class actually driven, insurance confirmation before they drive, vehicle-specific familiarity including lift gate and load restraints, customer-site access rules, and a written failure protocol covering no-answer drops, refrigeration problems, refused deliveries and breakdowns.

Where to start

Build the preboarding section first. It is the most valuable, it is entirely within your control before anyone arrives, and it is the part that turns a chaotic first morning into a normal one.

Then write the failure card for the cab. Ten minutes, one page, and it prevents more first-month distress than anything else on this list.

Everything else can be assembled across your next two hires. A checklist that covers eight items reliably beats one covering forty that nobody opens.