Consulting New-Hire Onboarding Checklist

Open the background-check order with the firm's vendor (Sterling, Checkr, or HireRight). For consultants slotted onto financial-services, healthcare, or government clients, expand the package — credit check, fingerprint, or clearance reactivation as the client agreement requires.

Route flagged results to Engagement Operations and the engagement partner before the start date. Do not provision firm access until the partner signs off — late escalation is the most common reason a Day-1 start gets pushed.

Have the new hire declare prior employers, board seats, family relationships, and personal investments. Engagement Operations screens the declaration against current and pipeline engagements before Day 1 — not at kickoff two weeks later.

Both documents survive employment termination. Confirm the IP assignment includes a background-IP carve-out clause if the consultant is bringing pre-existing frameworks or methodologies into the firm.

Check the consultant's first-90-day engagement assignment against client-specific compliance scope — HIPAA BAAs for healthcare, FINRA/SEC for financial services, FAR/DFARS or active clearance for government work.

Execute the additional controls the client agreement requires: HIPAA BAA acknowledgement and training, FINRA/SEC attestations, clearance verification through DCSA, or e-Verify for federal contractor work. Don't grant client-system access until these are on file.

Image the firm-standard laptop with disk encryption (Jamf or Intune managed). Provision the Okta or Entra ID account, enroll MFA, and assign SaaS licenses for Asana, Harvest, Slack, and the firm's CRM. Day-1 client access without Day-1 device controls is a recurring audit finding.

Walk through MFA enrollment, VPN connection, FileVault/BitLocker status, and the time-tracking app login. Confirm the consultant cannot reach client folders without going through firm SSO.

Cover the named cases concretely: client data lives on the firm-issued laptop or the client-provided VDI, never on personal email or personal cloud. Reference recent incidents so the protocol isn't abstract. New consultants get this twice — Day 1 and again at first engagement start.

Show how to charge against engagement codes, training codes, and business-development codes. Tracking starts at SOW signature for assigned engagements, not at kickoff — discovery hours that go untracked are direct revenue loss on T&M work.

Pair with a buddy at peer level and introduce the engagement partner and engagement manager for the first assignment. The mentor reviews any client-facing deliverable through the first 30 days.

Cover the firm's workstream playbook, deliverable templates (deck, report, model), the internal QA process, and the color-review or challenge-session gate before any client send.

Walk Asana or Monday for engagement tracking, Salesforce or HubSpot for pipeline visibility, Harvest or BigTime for time and expense, and the Slack channel architecture for engagements vs. practice areas.

Read prior deliverables, attend the weekly client status as observer, and meet the day-to-day client contact. Take notes on the RAID log format the engagement uses.

Run the independence screen against the actual engagement portfolio the consultant lands on, not just the hire-time generic check. Audit-adjacent advisory in particular needs a per-engagement gate, not a one-time formality.

The consultant's first client-facing contribution — a slide section, a model tab, an analysis appendix — goes through mentor review before any client-facing send. Quality variance on junior-staffed work is the most common cause of partner firefighting later.

Practice manager pulls the consultant's first month of time and confirms entries land on the right engagement codes, no missed days, and BD/training time is split out cleanly. Mistakes here distort utilization reporting and engagement profitability.

Engagement partner reviews ramp progress, deliverable quality, client-facing readiness, and blockers. Capture concrete examples — not just a green/yellow/red.

Walk the closeout end-to-end: lessons-learned retrospective, sanitized case-study draft, written reference consent capture, project archive of final deliverables and decisions log. Knowledge skipped here doesn't compound into firm IP.

Kick off the annual COI and independence re-attestation cycle. The 90-day mark is the natural anchor — the consultant has now been on real engagements and may have new disclosures since the hire-time declaration.

Cover utilization to date, deliverable quality, client-facing readiness, and growth areas. A passing review unlocks solo client-facing deliverable ownership pending engagement-manager signoff.