The Employee Onboarding Checklist Most 10-150 Person Indian Tech Companies Are Missing
Since 21 November 2025, every employer in India has to issue a formal appointment letter to every employee — not as good practice, as a legal requirement under the Labour Codes. Most 10-150 person tech companies we talk to already knew that much. Far fewer could tell us, without checking, what document comes next, or who in the company is supposed to send it.
That gap is the real onboarding problem. It isn't that founders and HR leads don't know an offer letter should be followed by an appointment letter, a probation period, and eventually a confirmation. It's that nobody wrote down when each one is due, so it happens whenever someone remembers — usually a few days late, occasionally not at all.
The four documents a new hire actually signs
Before an employee is fully "on record" at most Indian companies, they sign or receive at least four separate documents, each issued by a different trigger and, in a lot of small HR teams, by a different person.
| Stage | Document | Typically issued | What happens if it's skipped |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-joining | Offer letter | Within days of the final interview round | Candidate has nothing in writing to negotiate against or hold you to |
| Day of joining | Appointment letter | On or around the first working day | Non-compliant with the Labour Codes; no binding record of designation, CTC, or probation terms |
| End of probation | Confirmation letter | 3-6 months in, once probation is evaluated | Notice period stays ambiguous — is the employee still on the shorter probation notice, or not? |
| Ongoing | Payslips + policy acknowledgment | Every payroll cycle from month one | CTC structure, leave balance, and policy sign-off drift out of sync with what was promised at joining |
Four documents, four different windows, and in most 10-150 employee companies, four different reminders someone has to set manually — usually in a spreadsheet, sometimes in nothing at all.
Where it actually breaks down
The pattern is consistent across founder-led HR teams: hiring doesn't happen at a steady one-a-month pace, it happens in bursts. A funding round closes, three engineers start in the same fortnight, and whoever owns HR — often a founder, sometimes an office manager with five other jobs — is now tracking three separate probation clocks, three separate confirmation dates, and three sets of CTC math, on top of running payroll for everyone who already joined.
Appointment letters usually still go out, because the joining date forces the issue. Confirmation letters are the ones that slip. There's no external deadline pushing them, so a probation period that was meant to end in three months quietly runs to five, with nobody having formally confirmed the employee, revised their notice period, or documented any compensation change — because nobody scheduled the follow-up when the offer letter went out.
> The appointment letter has an external deadline forcing it — the confirmation letter doesn't, which is exactly why it's the document that goes missing most often.
The compliance clock that runs quietly in the background
PF and ESI enrollment sit in the same category. Both need to be set up early in an employee's tenure — PF becomes mandatory once a company crosses 20 employees, and ESI applies to employees earning up to ₹21,000 gross per month — but the exact enrollment window is the kind of detail that changes company to company and payroll consultant to payroll consultant, so we'd rather point you to your own compliance advisor for the current filing deadline than state one here. What we can say with certainty: leaving PF/ESI setup for "whenever the next payroll run happens to catch it" is a common gap at fast-growing small companies, not a deliberate choice anyone makes on purpose.
A 30/60/90 rhythm that actually gets followed
None of this needs to be complicated. The onboarding sequences that hold up at 10-150 employee companies tend to follow the same shape:
- Day 1-7: appointment letter signed, policies acknowledged, payroll and bank details collected, PF/ESI enrollment started
- Day 30: a short check-in — not a performance review, just "is anything missing"
- Day 60-90 (end of probation): performance conversation, then either a confirmation letter or a documented extension
- Ongoing: every payslip reflects the same designation and CTC structure the appointment letter promised, with no manual re-entry
The trick isn't a longer checklist. It's making the day-30 and confirmation steps trigger automatically instead of depending on someone remembering a spreadsheet cell three months after the hire started.
Where Clan fits into this
This is the part of HR software that's easy to undersell as "just document generation." In Clan, an employee's onboarding workflow starts the moment they're added to the system — offer and appointment terms carry forward into their payroll record automatically, so the CTC structure typed once doesn't get re-typed on every payslip. Policy acknowledgments and document uploads happen through the employee's own self-service login rather than an email thread, and where a company already runs approvals over WhatsApp, leave and onboarding-task sign-offs can go through the same channel employees already check.
We also publish the document generators themselves as free tools, since a lot of the onboarding trail is genuinely just correctly-formatted paperwork: an offer letter generator, an appointment letter generator, and — closing a gap we kept seeing — a probation confirmation letter generator that calculates the confirmation date from the joining date and probation length automatically, rather than leaving HR to work it out by hand. See clan.biz/offer-letter-generator, clan.biz/appointment-letter-generator, and clan.biz/probation-confirmation-letter-generator.
None of them require an account. If the rest of the onboarding workflow — the reminders, the payroll sync, the WhatsApp approvals — is what's actually missing at your company, that's what clan.biz/pricing and a short demo at clan.biz/demo are for.
