Summary

Hiring waves cluster, and IT queues cluster with them — every manager in the building files their onboarding request in the same fortnight. This guide is the requester's side of that ticket: what to send, when to send it, and the one line that turns a week of back-and-forth into a single request IT can act on immediately.

In this guide

• 1. Send the request two weeks before the start date
• 2. Give IT the details they always have to ask for
• 3. Name whose access to copy
• 4. List every account, device, and app explicitly
• 5. Say what has to work on the first morning
• 6. Copy this ticket template
• 7. Raise the same ticket when someone changes roles
• 8. Follow up without nagging

Before You Start

• The signed offer or contract, so the start date and job title are the real ones rather than the ones from the interview.
• Access to your organization's ticketing system — a portal, an email address, or a Teams channel. If you have never raised one, How to Submit an Effective IT Support Ticket covers the mechanics.
• The name of a current employee doing a similar job. You will need it in step 3, and it is worth more than anything else in the ticket.
• Working without an IT department? Then you are doing this yourself rather than asking, and How to Set Up a New Employee's IT Before Their First Day is the checklist you want instead of this one.

Instructions

1. Send the request two weeks before the start date

Lead time is the part managers consistently underestimate, and it is the only part IT cannot compress.

1. Raise the ticket two weeks out if the new hire needs a laptop, a phone, a monitor, or a license your organization does not already own. Hardware gets ordered, approved, delivered, imaged and encrypted — a chain of handoffs where each link waits for the one before it.
2. Raise it one week out if the person is inheriting an existing machine and an existing license. That is the fast path, and it is still not a same-day path.
3. Send it the day you have a signed contract, even if some details are unconfirmed. A ticket that says "start date confirmed, desk location to follow" starts the hardware clock. A ticket that waits for every field to be certain starts nothing.
4. Say the start date in the subject line: New starter setup — Jane Okafor — starts September 1. Helpdesk queues are triaged by date, and a date in the subject is what gets your ticket sorted into the right week.

2. Give IT the details they always have to ask for

Every field here exists because leaving it out generates a reply instead of an account.

• Full legal name and preferred name. The account is created from the legal name; the display name and email signature use the preferred one. A Katherine who has gone by Kate for thirty years should not have to ask for a rename in week two.
• Start date, and the date they are first in the building if that differs.
• Job title and department. Titles drive license types and group membership in most organizations.
• Manager, which is usually you — name yourself explicitly rather than assuming the ticket's sender is understood to be the manager.
• Cost code or budget owner, if your organization charges hardware and licenses back. Without it the request stalls at the approval step, and nobody tells you.
• Location, and whether they are remote. A remote starter needs the laptop couriered to a home address and a plan for handing over a password to someone nobody has met.
• Employment type — permanent, fixed-term, contractor, agency. This decides account expiry dates, license type, and in many places whether they can access certain systems at all.

3. Name whose access to copy

This is the single most useful line in the whole ticket, and most tickets do not have it.

1. Write one sentence: Same access as followed by a named current employee in a comparable role.
2. Understand what that line does. Without it, IT is guessing which of forty shared drives, distribution lists, and applications a "Marketing Executive" needs, and guessing wrong in either direction — too little access means a week of follow-up tickets, too much means an audit finding. With it, they open one existing account and read the answer off it.
3. Flag the differences explicitly: Same access as Priya Shah, except no access to the payroll folder. A copy plus an exception is precise; a copy alone is an assumption.
4. If nobody in the organization does this job yet, say so in those words. IT will then know the list in step 4 is the whole specification rather than a summary, and treat it accordingly.

4. List every account, device, and app explicitly

Assume nothing is implied, because the things that get missed are the things nobody wrote down.

• Email account and license type. Name the license if you know it. "The same license as the rest of the team" is a usable answer.
• Hardware and peripherals. Laptop, docking station, monitors and how many, keyboard, mouse, headset, laptop bag. Say whether they need a machine capable of heavier work — design, video, large datasets — because that is a different purchase, not a different setup.
• Phone. A company handset, a number, or a softphone on their laptop. If they are customer-facing and this is missed, they discover it on a call.
• Building and door access. Badge, car park, lift access, alarm code, out-of-hours access. This is frequently a different team from IT and needs to be asked for separately — name it in the ticket anyway so it gets routed rather than dropped.
• Shared drives and sites. List the actual folders and SharePoint sites by name. "The team drive" means something different in every department.
• Distribution lists and Teams. Which mailing lists should reach them, and which Teams and channels they need to be added to. New joiners who miss the department mailing list are invisible for a month.
• Third-party application logins. The CRM, the design suite, the accounting package, the analytics tool, whatever your team actually lives in. These are the most commonly forgotten items, and the reason is structural: IT cannot see the apps your team bought on a card. If your team pays for it, only your team knows it exists. How to Request New Software or App Access at Work covers what to include when one of these needs a license purchase of its own.

5. Say what has to work on the first morning

Separating day one from week one tells IT what to prioritize when the queue is full.

1. Ask for three things to be working before they sit down: a sign-in that works, their email account reachable, and their laptop powered on and updated. Everything else can follow.
2. Ask explicitly for multi-factor authentication enrollment to be part of day one, and name who walks them through it — an IT person, or you. An account without a second factor is the most attackable thing a new starter owns, and "we will sort it later" is how later becomes never.
3. Say how the password reaches them, and ask that the username and the temporary password travel by different routes. One message carrying both is a spare key taped to the door.
4. For a remote starter, ask for a named person and a time on the first morning. A courier tracking number is not an onboarding plan.
5. Send them Understanding Your First Week of IT — What to Set Up and Why on day one. It covers the signature, calendar and phone setup that belongs to them rather than to IT, and it stops those becoming three more tickets.

6. Copy this ticket template

Fill in the italics, delete what does not apply, and send it as one request.

Subject: New starter setup — full name — starts date

Who: Legal name: Katherine Okafor Preferred name: Kate Job title: Marketing Executive Department: Marketing Manager: your name Cost code: MK-204 Employment type: Permanent Start date: September 1 Location: Main office, in the building from day one

Access to copy: Same access as Priya Shah, except no access to the payroll folder.

Accounts and licenses:

• Email account, same license type as the rest of the marketing team
• CRM login — standard user
• Design suite login — paid seat, please confirm cost before purchase

Hardware:

• Laptop, standard specification
• Docking station, two monitors, keyboard, mouse, headset
• Company phone — customer-facing role

Access and membership:

• Building badge, main office, standard hours
• Shared drive: Marketing, Brand Assets
• SharePoint site: Campaign Planning
• Distribution lists: marketing@, all-staff@
• Teams: Marketing, Campaign 2026

Needed on day one: Working sign-in, mailbox reachable, MFA enrolled. I will sit with her for the MFA setup at 09:30. Please send the temporary password to me by phone, not email.

Please confirm: a completed checklist by August 29 so I can flag anything missing before she arrives.

7. Raise the same ticket when someone changes roles

A role change needs everything a new hire needs, and it is the ticket that almost never gets raised.

1. Send the same request when somebody moves between teams, changes job title, or takes on a new responsibility. Use the same "same access as" line, naming somebody already in the new role.
2. Ask explicitly for the old access to be removed as well as the new access granted. This is the half that gets skipped, and it is how people end up holding permissions for jobs they left three roles ago.
3. Ask IT to preserve rather than delete what they leave behind — a mailbox, a shared folder ownership, a license — until the handover is genuinely finished. Removing access is quick to reverse in the first few weeks and expensive to reverse after the retention window closes.
4. For a leaver, send the ticket before the last day, not after it. Include what happens to their mailbox and files, and who inherits them.

8. Follow up without nagging

One well-timed check beats four "any update?" messages, and it gets a better answer.

1. Ask for a completion checklist in the original ticket — a list of what has been done, mirroring what you asked for. That single request converts every future follow-up into a document you can read instead of a conversation you have to start.
2. Check in once, about three working days before the start date. Reply to the existing ticket rather than opening a new one; a new ticket loses the history and joins the back of the queue.
3. Ask a specific question. "Is the laptop ordered, and has the CRM license been approved?" gets an answer. "Any update?" gets a status change and nothing else.
4. On the morning itself, check the sign-in works before the new starter tries it. Ten minutes of your time turns a broken first hour into a ticket that gets fixed before anyone is watching.
5. When it goes well, say so in the ticket before you close it. Helpdesk teams hear about the failures by design and the successes by accident.

Troubleshooting

TIP

Put the two-week lead time in your own hiring checklist rather than trying to remember it. The onboarding ticket belongs at the same point in the process as the contract going out — not at the point where you start thinking about the first day. Every problem in the table below is a lead-time problem wearing a different hat.

Symptom / Error	Potential Cause	Solution
IT replies asking for details you assumed they had	Details assumed rather than stated	Reply on the same ticket with the full block from step 2. Then save the step 6 template somewhere you will find it next time, so this happens once rather than every hire.
The laptop has not arrived and the start date is Monday	Ticket raised inside the procurement lead time	Ask IT this directly: "Is there a loan machine available for the first week while the ordered one arrives?" Most organizations keep a small pool. Ask for the order's expected delivery date at the same time so you can plan the handover.
New starter has email but no access to shared drives or apps	Access request treated as a separate task	Reply to the ticket listing exactly what is missing, by name, and ask for it as a single batch. Access requests often route to a different queue from account creation — naming them together stops each one becoming its own ticket.
Nobody can approve the license purchase	No cost code or budget owner on the ticket	Add the cost code and name the budget holder in a reply. If your organization requires a purchase approval you cannot give, ask IT for the exact wording and the approver's name, then send that request yourself the same day.
The account exists but the password never reached anyone	Handover route never agreed	Ask for the password to be reset and sent to you by phone or text. Then agree the handover route in the ticket rather than leaving it to whoever picks it up.
Ticket sat untouched for a week	Misrouted or missing a start date	Reply on the existing ticket — do not open a new one, which loses the history — and put the start date in the first line. If your organization runs a service desk phone line, a one-minute call to confirm the queue it landed in beats another week of waiting.

Related Articles

• How to Set Up a New Employee's IT Before Their First Day
• How to Submit an Effective IT Support Ticket
• Understanding Your First Week of IT — What to Set Up and Why
• How to Request New Software or App Access at Work

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