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NIST 800-53 PS-4 NIST 800-53 AC-2 ISC2 CISSP 1.8 NIST CSF GV.RR-04 NIST 800-53 PS-3 CompTIA Security+ 5.1

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Onboarding and Termination Procedures

Secure employee onboarding and offboarding are critical IT processes that establish security expectations from day one and eliminate access risks at separation. Proper execution directly impacts retention, performance, and overall company security posture.

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About this video

Employee onboarding and offboarding are two of the most security-critical phases in the employment lifecycle, and handling them with precision has measurable consequences for both organizational security and business performance. Onboarding sets the tone for how an employee understands and practices security throughout their entire time with the company. Attempting to correct poor security habits after the fact is significantly more difficult and resource-intensive than establishing clear expectations from the start, making early training and proper setup foundational rather than optional. Beyond security, a well-executed onboarding process delivers substantial operational benefits. Organizations that onboard employees effectively see an 82% improvement in retention rates and revenue increases of up to 2.5 times compared to those with weak or inconsistent practices. Key components include provisioning the correct system accounts and permissions, configuring and delivering equipment before the first day, ensuring proper software licensing, enabling access to cloud services, and delivering training that covers company policies, procedures, systems use, and security expectations. Offboarding, also referred to as separation or termination, mirrors the onboarding process in reverse and carries its own significant security implications. When an employee exits the organization, all system accounts must be disabled promptly, hardware must be collected, and software licenses must be returned to inventory. Failure to execute these steps in a timely and consistent manner exposes the organization to serious risk, including unauthorized access to sensitive systems and data. Documenting both processes is essential to running them reliably and at scale. Written procedures reduce the chance of missed steps, provide a baseline for continuous refinement, improve operational efficiency, and raise the overall quality of execution over time. Treating onboarding and offboarding as formal, documented workflows rather than informal checklists is a security best practice with direct impact on risk management and organizational resilience.

What you'll learn

Describe the key security considerations and procedural steps involved in employee onboarding and offboarding, including account provisioning, equipment management, and training requirements.
Distinguish between the security implications of improper onboarding versus improper offboarding and the organizational risks associated with each.

What's covered

Employee Onboarding & Offboarding Security

Onboarding Importance
- Sets Security Tone
- 82% Retention Boost
- 2.5x Revenue Increase
- Improves Employee Performance
Offboarding & Separation
- Security Risks if Mishandled
- Also Called Termination
- Reverse of Onboarding Steps
Account Management
- Active Directory & Groups
- Software Licensing
- Cloud Service Access
- Disable Accounts at Separation
Equipment Handling
- Configure & Ship Before Day One
- Maintain Hardware Inventory
- Collect Equipment at Termination
Documentation & Training
- Document Processes & Procedures
- Consistent & Refinable Steps
- Security & Systems Training
- Company Policies & Help Desk

Aligned to

NIST 800-53

PS-4 Personnel Termination

AC-2 Account Management

PS-3 Personnel Screening

ISC2 CISSP

1.8 Contribute to and enforce personnel security policies and procedures

NIST CSF

GV.RR-04 Cybersecurity is included in human resources practices.

CompTIA Security+

5.1 Summarize elements of effective security governance.

Key terms

Identity and Access Management: A framework of policies and technologies that ensures the right users have appropriate access to resources.
Active Directory: Microsoft's directory service used to manage users, computers, and resources in a network.
Role-Based Access Control: An access control model that assigns permissions based on a user's role within an organization.
Least Privilege: A security principle that grants users and systems only the minimum access rights needed to perform their functions.
Access Control: A security mechanism that restricts access to resources based on policies, roles, or identity.
Security Policy: A formal document that defines an organization's security goals, rules, and responsibilities.
Account Provisioning: The process of creating, configuring, and managing user accounts and access rights when an employee joins or leaves an organization.
Offboarding: The process of revoking a departing or transitioning employee's system access and decommissioning their accounts to prevent unauthorized access.

Topics

Identity And Access Management Account Provisioning Employee Offboarding Security Policy User Lifecycle Management Cybersecurity Governance

Transcript

One of the most critical parts of an employee's journey is the onboarding and offboarding steps, at least from a security standpoint. So let's specifically take a look at that onboarding process, and when it comes time for separation, what do we do.

Why Onboarding Matters

When you're onboarding an employee, it's a critical part from a security standpoint. You're really setting the tone of how security is going to be for the complete employment of that individual. It's really hard to start changing things after they've already been trained — you can, but it takes a lot more time and effort than if we set the tone right from the beginning. Also, there's some concerns if we don't do things properly at the separation time; it can really open up the company for risk.

We really do need to set the tone on the onboarding process of how security is going to be handled for this employee, but that's not the only reason to do this. If we do onboarding correctly — and not just from a security perspective, but in other ways as well — we really enhance the performance of that employee. In fact, so much so that there is an 82% boost in retention rate, that is, how many people stay with the company if you do onboarding correctly. So they're 82% more likely to stick with the company if you do onboarding correctly. Not only that, but it shows that they perform much better in the long run, and the revenue of the company increases two and a half times with a strong onboarding process. So this really contributes to a lot of the success of the company in many different ways. Of course we're taking it from a security perspective, but in a lot of other ways we want this strong onboarding process.

Offboarding

A strong offboarding process is obviously not going to have a direct impact on how well the employee performs — they're already leaving the company at that point in time. There are some indirect benefits that would still make us want a strong offboarding process, but also there are definitely some security ramifications when it comes to this offboarding process and making sure that we get it right.

By the way, you may hear me use the term offboarding sometimes — that's just the process that we go through in offboarding an employee. During that time we can call it a separation, or it's also called a termination. So you'll hear me use several different terms for this exiting process, or the separation process.

Document the Process

Here's just a reminder that documenting this out will really help us run this out consistently, to make sure that we're not missing steps. We can help improve the process, because now we have something that we can continually refine and get better and better. It can help make us more efficient, and the quality that we have in the long run is going to be much better. I find this is one of those critical processes and procedures that we should be documenting.

Accounts, Equipment and Training

A big focus during both of these times is going to be the accounts: making sure that they have the right system accounts — maybe it's Active Directory, maybe it's certain groups that they have access to, certain resources, certain software. Making sure that software is installed, make sure they have the proper licensing, make sure that if it's a cloud environment that they have the ability to access those services up in the cloud.

A big part of this also is making sure that they have the right equipment to do their job: that we set it up correctly, that we configured it correctly, that we ship it to them in time, and that we can support that equipment. It actually starts well before this, making sure that we have inventory so that way we can get this all done and shipped to them before they start their first day. In a lot of positions that's very critical, that they have their equipment the first day.

I've also mentioned how training is critically important during this stage. This onboarding training sets the tone for everything else. So we're going to perhaps train them on how to use the equipment, how to use systems, how to access help desk and other services, what the company policies, processes and procedures are, and any other security training that we want to develop and give during this time.

The termination part of this is not really all that different. Of course we don't go to the degree of this training when they're separating out, but we definitely need to make sure that accounts are turned off, that the systems are returned, that the licensing for software gets sent back into our inventory, that their hardware gets collected.

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