Expanding your workforce can be an exciting time for your business. But with so much paperwork for you and your new employees to complete correctly, it can also be tricky to onboard new hires while staying compliant with employment laws and regulations.
Complete Payroll Solutions’ team of certified HR professionals assist clients with all aspects of hiring, from drafting job descriptions to onboarding. We understand the steps that are required to bring on a new worker properly. To help ensure you start your employees off right, in this article, we’ll cover:
After reading this, you’ll know what documents are required when hiring a new employee so you can make sure you onboard correctly.
Once you hire an employee, onboarding is the process of bringing them into the company, assimilating them into your culture, and ensuring they have the tools to ramp up quickly to be a productive member of the team.
There are several steps involved in employee onboarding:
This last one – new hire paperwork – is often the one that causes the most stress for employers and employees alike so we’ll focus on that here.
The type of paperwork your new employees will need to fill out may vary depending on the type of position. For example, if they’re a part-time worker, they may not be eligible for benefits so you wouldn’t need to provide them health benefit enrollment forms.
Generally speaking, however, these are the primary employment forms that you’ll ask your new employee to complete:
While many companies provide these documents in printed form, there are also many different onboarding software solutions available that automatically send documentation tasks to new employees and allow you to get electronic signatures. You can purchase one of these solutions on your own or you may get it as part of a package if you choose to outsource your payroll to a third-party provider.
Once you have the signed documents from your employees, it’s your responsibility to store them properly for the required amount of time. For example, you should keep a Form I-9 on file for each current employee and, once they terminate, for three years after the date of hire or 1 year after the day their employment ended, whichever is later. Since new hire paperwork has different recordkeeping requirements, you should familiarize yourself with the rules and develop a records retention schedule.
In addition to collecting required paperwork from new employees, you’re also required to report some information to your state to help recover delinquent child support payments. This reporting is required by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), a law implemented jointly by federal and state agencies to ensure proper wage garnishments if an employee owes child support.
Typically, you’ll need to report an employee’s name, address, Social Security number, and date of hire as well as your name and address and your FEIN. Some states also require additional data for their reporting. Under PRWORA, the information is required within 20 days, but some states may require it sooner.
Since states have the option to impose civil monetary penalties for noncompliance, it’s important that you report new hire information timely.
For example, in Massachusetts, new hire reporting is due within 14 days of an employee’s start date and, in Maine, the information is due within 7 days of the hire date. Since states have the option to impose civil monetary penalties for noncompliance, it’s important that you report new hire information timely.
The US Department of Health & Human Services Office of Child Support Enforcement has a list of all state requirements.
If you use an outsourced payroll provider, their technology platform will typically transmit this new hire information to your state agency automatically. You’ll still want to confirm it’s being taken care of.
There’s a lot of documentation required when bringing on a new employee. And it’s important to get it right for a number of reasons.
Since there are so many steps to keep track of when it comes to new hire paperwork and a lot at stake, you may be wondering if there are ways to help you stay on top of everything.
One of the best ways to avoid missing anything is to create a checklist for new employees that lists what materials you need to provide to your new hire and forms they need to complete. When you use a checklist, you’ll be able to make sure applicable paperwork is distributed and received back from the employee by checking off the box next to each item as they complete it.
You may also choose to outsource some of your HR functions like hiring and onboarding. At Complete Payroll Solutions, we can help you recruit the staff you need then onboard them seamlessly into your company with technology that simplifies the process. Bring on new hires quickly and compliantly with our HR team’s customized services.