Somebody starts on Monday. You want them to feel welcome, to meet the team, to understand what the job actually involves and to leave on Friday thinking they made the right decision. That is the part of onboarding everybody thinks about, and it matters more than any document.
Running underneath it is a second process that nobody feels warmly about, made up of statements that must be handed over within defined windows, forms that must be lodged within defined periods, and records that must exist from the first day and be kept for seven years. None of it improves the new starter's first week. All of it is enforceable. The businesses that get caught out are rarely the ones that did not care: they are the ones where the welcome went well and the paperwork went into a drawer.
This guide sets out the compliance layer of onboarding in the order it actually happens. It assumes the hiring decision is made and the employment type is settled, because the obligations below vary depending on whether the person is permanent, casual or on a fixed term contract. If that question is still open, resolve it first, because getting the employment type right before day one determines which of these steps apply.
Onboarding is a compliance process, not just a welcome
Two things make onboarding compliance unusual. The first is that the obligations are front-loaded: several of them attach at or before the start date, which means there is no opportunity to fix them retrospectively without the correction itself being visible.
The second is that the evidence standard is binary. A Fair Work Inspector asking whether an employee received the Fair Work Information Statement is not weighing up how good your induction was. Either the record exists or it does not, which makes these among the easiest contraventions to establish and among the cheapest to avoid.
That combination is why onboarding compliance tends to fail in growing businesses rather than careless ones. A business with one or two staff runs onboarding as a conversation, and it works. At eight or ten employees the conversation is happening with different people at different times, nobody owns the sequence, and the statements start going out inconsistently. By the time anyone builds a process, there is a back catalogue of employees whose records are incomplete, and the gaps are not discoverable without going person by person.
What must be given, and when
Three information statements sit in the National Employment Standards. Which ones apply depends on the employee in front of you.
Fair Work Information Statement, for every new employee
Every new employee must be given a copy of the Fair Work Information Statement before they start, or as soon as possible after they start. There is no exemption for small business, no exemption for short engagements and no exemption for someone who has worked for you before.
The statement itself covers:
- The National Employment Standards
- The right to request flexible working arrangements
- Modern awards, and making agreements under the Fair Work Act
- Individual flexibility arrangements
- Freedom of association and workplace rights, meaning the general protections
- Termination of employment, and right of entry
- The roles of the Fair Work Ombudsman and the Fair Work Commission
It can be given by any of several methods:
- In person
- By mail
- By email
- By emailing a link to the Fair Work Ombudsman page hosting it
- By emailing a link to a copy on the employer's own intranet
The current Fair Work Information Statement is republished whenever minimum wages change, so the version matters: issue the one in force on the day you issue it, not the PDF saved in your induction folder two years ago.
Casual Employment Information Statement, and its re-issue points
New casual employees must be given the Casual Employment Information Statement before they start or as soon as possible after, in addition to the Fair Work Information Statement. This is the obligation employers most often meet once and then forget, because unlike the Fair Work Information Statement it does not end at commencement.
The statement exists because casual employment can change. It covers:
- The definition of a casual employee
- How casual employment can be changed, including when an employee can notify their employer of an intention to change to permanent employment
- The reasons an employer may not accept an employee's notice
- The role of the Fair Work Commission in dealing with disputes
Re-issuing it at intervals is how the system keeps long-serving casuals informed of a pathway that becomes more relevant the longer they stay.
The statement must be given again at set points during the employment relationship, and the timing depends on the size of the business:
- Small business employers, meaning employers with fewer than 15 employees, must give it again after 12 months of employment
- All other employers must give it again after 6 months and after 12 months of employment, and then after every subsequent 12 months
For a business sitting near the 15 employee threshold this is worth pausing on, because the headcount for that definition includes employees of associated entities and includes casual employees who are engaged on a regular and systematic basis. A business that crosses the threshold moves onto the more frequent schedule.
Fixed Term Contract Information Statement, when it applies
Where an employee enters a new fixed term contract, they must also be given the Fixed Term Contract Information Statement. The trigger is entering the contract, which means a rolling series of fixed term arrangements generates the obligation each time rather than once at the beginning of the relationship.
Getting pay and super set up correctly
The tax and superannuation steps have an order to them, and the order is not obvious. Doing them in the wrong sequence is what causes the super step to fail.
TFN declaration and the 14 day rule
A new employee should complete a tax file number declaration so you can work out how much to withhold. Where they provide one, you lodge it with the Australian Taxation Office within 14 days.
The rule people miss applies when they do not provide one. If an employee has not given you a valid tax file number declaration within 14 days of the employment relationship starting, you must complete a declaration with the details you do have and send it to the ATO anyway. The obligation does not lapse because the employee was slow, and it is not satisfied by waiting for them. Separately, where an employee has indicated they have applied for a tax file number or asked about an existing one, they have 28 days to give it to you, and you withhold at standard rates during that period. After 28 days without a tax file number, the top rate of withholding applies to future payments.
Super choice and the stapled fund request
Eligible employees must be offered a choice of superannuation fund. Where an employee chooses one, that is the end of it.
Where they do not choose, and they started with you on or after 1 November 2021, you must request their stapled super fund details from the ATO. A stapled fund is an existing account linked to the employee that follows them between jobs. The sequence matters, because a request cannot be made until an employment relationship exists in the ATO's systems, and that link is established by lodging either a tax file number declaration or a Single Touch Payroll pay event. Requests are made through ATO online services, and the ATO's guidance for employers on stapled super funds sets out the access permissions needed.
The consequence of skipping the step is specific rather than general. An employer who contributes to a fund the employee did not choose, without having made a stapled super fund request, is liable to pay the superannuation guarantee charge, including a choice loading. Paying the right amount into the wrong fund is still a failure.
Records you must create and keep
Record-keeping obligations begin on day one, not at the first pay run, and time and wages records must be kept for seven years. Records have to be legible, in English, and readily accessible to a Fair Work Inspector. They cannot be altered except to correct an error, and they cannot be false or misleading.
What the records must contain is prescribed rather than left to judgement. At a minimum:
- Employer and employee name, the employer's ABN, and the employee's commencement date
- Whether the employee is full-time or part-time, and whether they are permanent, temporary or casual
- The pay rate, gross and net amounts paid, and any deductions
- Details of any incentive payment, bonus, loading, penalty rate or other monetary allowance
- Overtime hours worked, including start and finish times, and the hours worked by casual or irregular part-time employees paid by time worked
- Leave taken and leave balances, plus any agreement to cash out leave or take it in advance
Pay slips are a separate obligation and must be given within one working day of pay day, even where the employee is on leave. They can be electronic or hard copy, and an electronic pay slip must carry the same information as a paper one.
The commencement date and the employment type recorded at onboarding are the fields everything else is later reconciled against. Leave accruals, notice entitlements, redundancy calculations, the minimum employment period for unfair dismissal purposes and the Casual Employment Information Statement re-issue schedule all count from that date. An error entered in week one does not stay a week one error: it propagates quietly through every calculation that depends on it, and it usually surfaces at termination, which is the worst possible moment to discover the record was wrong.
Employees can also ask to see their own records, and that right survives the end of employment. Records are private and accessible only to the employer, payroll staff, the employee and authorised people such as an accountant.
A compliant first week, in order
Sequenced, the compliance layer looks like this:
- Before or on the start date, issue the Fair Work Information Statement, and the Casual Employment Information Statement if the employee is casual, or the Fixed Term Contract Information Statement if they are entering a fixed term contract. Record the date and the method.
- On or immediately after the start date, have the tax file number declaration completed and lodge it within 14 days. This also establishes the employment relationship the ATO needs.
- Offer choice of superannuation fund. If the employee nominates a fund, record it. If they do not, request their stapled fund details once the employment relationship is established.
- Create the employee record with commencement date, employment type and pay rate, and start the leave accruals for permanent employees.
- Diarise the Casual Employment Information Statement re-issue dates where the employee is casual, at 12 months for a small business employer, or at 6 and 12 months and annually thereafter for everyone else.
Step five is the one that never gets done, because it requires remembering in six months something that felt finished in week one. It costs nothing to put in a calendar on the day, and it is the difference between an obligation that is met and one that is quietly breached three times before anyone notices.
The other habit worth building is recording the date and method of every statement issued, in the employee's file, at the time. Not because anyone will ask this year, but because the question, when it comes, is always about someone who started four years ago and left eighteen months back, and memory is not evidence.
Onboarding compliance is unglamorous, cheap to get right at the start, and expensive to reconstruct later. If it would help to have the statements, records and first-week sequence built once and documented properly so every future hire runs the same way, Brookvale HR Solutions provides a documented onboarding and policy framework. Daniel Holbrook does the work personally, on a fixed fee, with no lock-in contracts.
