Employee Onboarding Form: What to Collect and When to Send

An employee onboarding form collects what you need from a new hire before and around their first day: personal details, an emergency contact, tax and payroll paperwork, equipment and account needs, and a signed acknowledgment of your policies. Send it as soon as the offer is accepted, follow it with short check-ins at 30, 60 and 90 days, and route each answer to the person who acts on it (payroll, IT, the manager) automatically. That removes most of the chasing that makes onboarding feel like paperwork.

Below is the full set of onboarding forms, what each one should ask, the order to send them in, and how to wire them up so nobody has to copy answers between systems.

The onboarding forms a new hire needs

Most companies need the same handful of forms. You can combine some of them into one new hire onboarding form or send them separately; the next section covers that choice.

Form	What it collects	When	Who acts on it
New hire information	Legal and preferred name, contact details, address, date of birth, start date, job title	Right after the offer is accepted	HR
Tax and payroll handoff	Completed official tax forms, payroll setup, or confirmation they were done in the payroll system	Before the first payday, often before day one	Payroll
Equipment and accounts	Laptop preference, accessories, shipping address for remote staff, software access	1 to 2 weeks before start	IT
Emergency contact	Name, relationship, phone numbers	Before day one	HR, office manager
Policy acknowledgment	Confirmation that they read the handbook and key policies, with a signature and date	Before or on day one	HR
Getting to know you	Preferred working hours, communication preferences, a few fun facts for the team intro	1 week before start	Manager, buddy
30/60/90 check-ins	How onboarding is going, what is unclear, support needed	Day 30, 60 and 90	Manager, HR

New hire information form

This is the core record. Ask for:

Full legal name and preferred name (the one you will use in email signatures and introductions)
Personal email and phone
Home address
Date of birth, if your payroll or benefits provider needs it
Job title, team, manager and start date (or pass these in so the new hire only confirms them; see the automation section)
Pronouns, optional

Use a contact info block for name, email and phone so they are collected together, and date blocks for anything date-like so you do not get "next Monday" as an answer.

Tax and payroll handoff

Tax forms are set by your tax authority, and the official versions are what payroll needs. For example:

In the US, new employees complete Form W-4 so the employer knows how much federal income tax to withhold. Form I-9 is different: the employee completes Section 1 no later than their first day of work for pay, and the employer must complete Section 2 by the third business day, which includes examining the employee's identity and work authorization documents (USCIS). A general form cannot do that document check for you.
In Canada, people starting with a new employer complete the federal TD1 form, plus a provincial or territorial TD1 if they claim more than the basic personal amount (Canada Revenue Agency). The CRA accepts electronic TD1s only under specific conditions, so check them before you change how you collect these.

Other countries have their own equivalents; check your tax authority's guidance.

The cleanest approach is to keep identity numbers and bank details inside your payroll or HR system, which is built for them, and use the onboarding form only for the handoff: a link to the payroll portal, a yes/no "I have completed my tax and direct deposit setup", or an upload of the completed official forms if that is how your payroll team works. If you collect uploads, limit who can open the responses and delete them once payroll has what it needs.

Equipment and accounts form

IT needs answers early enough to order and set up hardware. Ask:

Laptop preference (Mac, Windows, no preference), if you offer a choice
Accessories: monitor, keyboard, headset, docking station
Will they work remotely, in the office, or hybrid? If remote, ask for a shipping address and a date someone will be home
Which tools they need access to on day one (often implied by role, so confirm rather than ask from scratch)
Accessibility needs for equipment or software

Emergency contact form

Keep it short: contact name, relationship, primary and secondary phone, and optionally a second contact. Make it easy to update later by sharing the same form link in your HR handbook. The emergency contact form guide covers keeping these records current.

Policy acknowledgment with signature

Ask new hires to confirm they have read the employee handbook and the policies that matter most: code of conduct, IT and acceptable use, confidentiality, health and safety, remote work. For each, link to the document, ask a yes/no "I have read and understood this policy", then finish with a drawn signature and the date.

A signature block gives you a clear record that the person saw and accepted the policies. Electronic signatures are accepted for many workplace documents in many countries, but rules and exceptions vary, so check with your legal or HR advisor for anything beyond policy acknowledgments. Employment contracts and offer letters are usually better handled in a dedicated e-signature tool that produces a signed copy of the document itself. More on this in our guide to forms with electronic signatures.

Getting to know you

A short, optional form a week before the start date helps the manager and onboarding buddy plan the first week. Ask how the person prefers to receive feedback, their usual working hours, whether they prefer structured training or exploring on their own, and two or three fun facts to share in the team channel, with a yes/no question asking whether they are happy for those to be shared. This is where onboarding starts to feel personal rather than administrative.

30, 60 and 90 day check-ins

New hires notice friction that everyone else has stopped seeing. A short check-in at each milestone tells you what to fix before it turns into an early resignation. Good questions:

How clear is what is expected of you in your role? (opinion scale 1 to 5)
Do you have the tools and access you need? (yes/no, with a follow-up on no)
What has been the most useful part of onboarding so far?
What has been confusing or missing?
How supported do you feel by your manager and team? (opinion scale)
Is there anything you would like to talk about privately with HR? (optional)

Keep each check-in under five minutes. At 90 days, add a question asking them to rate onboarding as a whole and suggest one change. A first-week pulse is also worth sending; the employee pulse survey template is a good base.

One onboarding form or several?

You can send one combined onboarding questionnaire or a sequence of smaller forms. Both work; pick based on who acts on the answers and when.

One combined form is simpler for the new hire: one link, done. The new employee onboarding form template does this, covering personal details, emergency contact, a payroll form upload, equipment preference, welcome pack size, dietary needs, a handbook confirmation and a signature. It suits small teams where one person handles everything.

Several smaller forms suit larger teams. IT gets the equipment form two weeks out, HR gets the policy acknowledgment on day one, and the manager gets the check-ins later. Each form stays short, and each team only sees what it needs.

A middle path is one form with logic. Ask early whether the person is full-time, part-time or a contractor, and whether they will be remote or in the office, then skip questions that do not apply: contractors skip benefits and equipment, office staff skip the shipping address. One question at a time also makes a longer form feel lighter on a phone.

Sequencing: when to send each form

A typical timeline looks like this:

Offer accepted: send the new hire information form, with the emergency contact and payroll handoff included or right after it.
Two weeks before the start date: equipment and accounts, so IT has time to order and ship.
One week before: the getting-to-know-you form and a welcome message with first-day details.
Day one: policy acknowledgment with signature, plus how to request time off and other everyday processes.
End of week one: a short pulse check.
Days 30, 60 and 90: check-ins.

Day one is also a good time to show new hires the forms they will use from then on. If time off is requested through a form, share the time off request form link in the welcome pack so the first request does not involve asking around. We cover the full setup in automating time off requests.

Automating onboarding with Google Sheets, Slack and webhooks

The point of putting onboarding into forms is that answers go straight to the people who need them. Here is how that works in FlowyForm, with features available on the free plan unless noted.

Prefill context with hidden fields

Add hidden fields such as role, team, manager and start date, then send each new hire a link with those values in it, for example ?team=support&manager=dana&start=2026-12-01. The values are stored with the response, so every row in your tracker already says which team the person joins, and you can use them in logic (for example, show the engineering tools question only when team is engineering).

Personalize with answer recall

Insert the person's preferred name into later questions and the ending screen: "Thanks, Priya, see you on Monday." It is a small touch, but it makes a form feel like a welcome rather than an intake.

Google Sheets as the onboarding tracker

Connect Google Sheets so each submission becomes a row. Add columns for status, laptop ordered, accounts created and buddy assigned, and you have a simple onboarding checklist that HR, IT and managers can share.

Slack for the teams that act

Post each response to a channel with the Slack integration: an equipment form can post to the IT channel, a getting-to-know-you form to the team's channel (only if the new hire agreed to share). Keep sensitive forms, such as the new hire information form, out of busy channels and use email notifications to HR instead.

Webhooks for everything else

To create tasks in a project tool, add the person to your HR system, or send a welcome email sequence, use a webhook to send each response as JSON to Zapier, Make, n8n or your own backend, and let that tool do the next step. FlowyForm does not have native integrations with HR systems, so webhooks or Google Sheets are the way to reach them.

Confirmation and follow-up

The email notification tells you when each form is completed. On Premium, you can also send the new hire a confirmation email after they submit, and use ending redirects to send them to a page with first-day details.

Keep improving the process

Onboarding should change as the company does. Every few months:

Read the 90-day check-ins together and look for repeated complaints about the same step.
Look at where people stop. Basic analytics show views, starts and completions for each form; Premium adds drop-off per question, which shows exactly where a long form loses people.
Remove questions whose answers nobody uses. If IT always gives everyone the same laptop, stop asking.
Ask recent hires what they wish they had known in week one, and add it to the welcome pack.

What forms cannot do

Forms handle the collecting, but some parts of onboarding need other tools or people: identity document checks (such as the I-9 review in the US), signing employment contracts, setting up payroll and benefits, and creating accounts. Use forms to gather inputs and trigger those steps, not to replace the systems built for them.

How to set up onboarding forms in FlowyForm

Start from the new employee onboarding form template.
Remove what you collect elsewhere (for example, the payroll upload if your payroll portal handles it) and add what is missing, such as remote or office and a shipping address.
Add hidden fields for team, manager and start date, and use them in logic where questions only apply to some roles.
Link each policy document from the acknowledgment questions and keep the signature at the end.
Connect Google Sheets and add your checklist columns; connect Slack for the teams that act on equipment requests.
Duplicate a short check-in form for 30, 60 and 90 days and set yourself calendar reminders to send it to each new hire.

FAQ

What forms do new employees fill out?

Usually a new hire information form, official tax forms for payroll, direct deposit or payroll setup, an emergency contact form, a policy and handbook acknowledgment, and an equipment or accounts request. Some roles add a confidentiality agreement, benefits enrollment or a background check consent, depending on the country and company.

What is the difference between an onboarding form and an onboarding questionnaire?

An onboarding form collects facts and paperwork (details, contacts, signatures). An onboarding questionnaire asks about the person and their experience: preferences, how they like to work, and later how onboarding is going. Many teams use both.

When should new hires complete onboarding paperwork?

Send the forms as soon as the offer is accepted so they can be finished before day one. Some deadlines are legal: in the US, the I-9 Section 1 is due by the employee's first day of work for pay. Leave the first day for meeting people rather than filling in forms.

Can new hires sign policies online?

Yes. A form with a signature block can record that the person read and accepted each policy, with the date. For employment contracts and other legal documents, check local rules and consider a dedicated e-signature tool.

How do I automate new hire onboarding paperwork?

Put each step into a form, prefill known details with hidden fields, send responses to a Google Sheets tracker, post equipment requests to the IT team's Slack channel, and use webhooks with an automation tool to create tasks or update your HR system.

Should onboarding be one form or several?

One form is simplest for small teams. Larger teams usually split it by who acts on the answers (HR, payroll, IT, manager) and when they need them. Logic lets one form skip questions that do not apply.

Employee onboarding forms: what to collect and how to automate it