Make an Employee Onboarding Timeline

An onboarding timeline lays out what happens when someone joins: the paperwork before they start, their first day, the training and introductions in the weeks after, and the check-ins that end with a review around day 90. It gives the new hire a clear picture of what to expect, and it shows HR, IT and the manager which parts are theirs and when each one is due.

The usual stages

Most onboarding plans follow the same shape, whatever the role:

Before the first day. The signed offer, contracts and tax forms, a laptop and accounts set up by IT, and a welcome message with the first day's schedule.
The first day and first week. A tour, introductions to the team, setting up equipment, and the first meeting with their manager.
The first 30 days. Training, reading up on the company, shadowing colleagues and one small piece of real work.
Days 31 to 60. Taking on regular work with less supervision, and a check-in on how it is going.
Days 61 to 90. Working independently, and a review at the end that sets goals for the rest of the year.

Many teams call this a 30-60-90 day plan. A timeline is a good way to show one, because each phase has a length, the phases run back to back, and several people work in parallel during each one.

Building an onboarding timeline in Preceden

Create a timeline and choose the Multiple Layers layout. Give each group its own layer, such as HR, IT, Manager and New Hire, and click Add Layer above the timeline if you need more. Each task then sits in the lane of whoever is responsible for it, which is the same setup as a swimlane timeline.

Then add an event for each task or phase:

Mark the start date with a milestone. Add an event called "First day" with a start date only, open More Options and check Make this event a milestone. Preceden draws it as a line through every layer, so you can see what has to be done before it. Make a Milestone Timeline covers milestones in more detail.
For a phase, you can type a length into the end date instead of a date. 30 days or 2 weeks is added to the start date for you, and 10 weekdays skips weekends. Supported Date Formats lists every duration Preceden accepts.
Use Percent Complete, under More Options, to shade in how much of each phase is done.

Let the plan follow the start date

Start dates move. A candidate asks for an extra week, or a background check takes longer than expected. Rather than editing every date by hand, make each phase start when the one before it ends.

Add the "First day" milestone first. For the first phase, check Dependent beside Start Date, pick "First day" from the list, and give the phase a duration such as 30 days. A dependent of a milestone starts on the milestone's date. Make the next phase depend on the first one, and so on. When you change the first-day date, every phase in the chain moves with it. Make an Event Start When Another Event Ends explains how dependencies work, including what happens when a dependent has a fixed end date.

The same works across layers. The manager's 30-day check-in can depend on the first-month training event in the New Hire layer, so it always lands at the end of the month, whenever that is.

Keep it current

Under Appearance > Axis, check Display a line on today's date to draw a red line at today. During onboarding, everything to the left of it should be finished or under way, so it is easy to see whether anything has slipped. Appearance Settings - Axis covers the other axis options.

Share a link to the timeline in the welcome email, so the new hire can see the plan before the first day and come back to it whenever they need to. Because it is a link, they always see the current version. You can also export a PDF for an onboarding packet. On a Pro plan, you can invite the manager and HR as collaborators, so each of them can update their own lane.

If you onboard people often, build the plan once and duplicate it for each new hire, then change the first-day date.

If you're rolling out a new system or process rather than bringing in a person, see Make an Implementation Timeline.