New hire IT setup checklist

Someone starts Monday, and before then, somebody has to go create every account they’ll need. Done well, they’re productive on day one. Done the usual way, they spend their first morning waiting on IT tickets while everyone else is in a standup they can’t fully follow yet.

The checklist

Before day one

Create their email/identity account (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or whatever you run) and get their laptop ready.
Add them to the right groups — the ones that unlock everything downstream, so you’re not doing this app by app.

Day one, or before

Chat tool (Slack, Teams) — added to the right channels, not just the account.
Code host (GitHub, GitLab) — repo access scoped to what their role actually needs.
Docs and wiki (Notion, Confluence, or similar) — this is usually where the actual onboarding material lives, so it has to work before anything else does.
Password manager — added to the team vault so they’re not asking around for shared logins on day one.

Within the first week

Project management / issue tracker.
CRM, if their role touches it.
Any department-specific tools — design, support, finance, whatever’s specific to the role.

Why the first day is the tell

The gap between a good onboarding and a bad one isn’t the checklist — every company has roughly this list somewhere. It’s whether all of it is done before day one instead of trickling in over the first week while the new hire pings people individually for access to things they assumed they’d already have. That first impression is hard to undo, and it’s rarely about the work — it’s about how invisible the company’s operations are.

The fix that isn’t a longer checklist

Rostid is built so this checklist happens in one step instead of one app at a time: add someone to your company’s roster once, and their access appears everywhere you’ve connected — before their first standup, not three days and four reminders later.