Best Practices for Securely Onboarding Employees

Some best practices for securely onboarding employees include conducting comprehensive background checks, providing security training for new hires, ensuring employees have least privilege access, equipping employees with a password manager and continuously monitoring employee activity for unusual behavior. The more secure an onboarding process is, the easier and more secure it’ll be to offboard employees.

Continue reading to learn more about best practices for secure employee onboarding and its importance. 

What is secure employee onboarding and why is it important?

Secure employee onboarding refers to the procedures for onboarding employees that emphasize following security best practices. The goal of a secure onboarding process is to ensure the security of both the organization’s data and the employee’s data. Not only does a secure employee onboarding process reduce vulnerabilities, but it also helps organizations meet regulatory compliance and mitigate the risk of insider threats.

5 secure employee onboarding best practices

Here are some best practices for secure employee onboarding.

1. Conduct comprehensive background checks

Background checks are a critical step when hiring new employees. Before hiring an employee, organizations should conduct a comprehensive background check that verifies the candidate’s education, employment history and criminal record. Additionally, organizations should require that each potential employee provide references that can vouch for their character and reliability. 

2. Provide new hires with security training

Ensuring your employees are properly trained on cybersecurity best practices helps mitigate the risk of them making a mistake that can result in a breach. On an employee’s first day and beyond, provide them with security training that involves phishing awareness, proper handling of company data and password best practices. The more trained employees are in cybersecurity, the more secure your organization will be. 

3. Ensure least privilege access

Implementing the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) in your organization ensures that each employee only has access to the resources they need to perform their job duties – no more and no less. Employees are often given excessive privileges that lead to an increased attack surface. The bigger an organization’s attack surface is, the easier it is for cybercriminals to move laterally throughout the network if they were to breach it. 

In addition to decreasing your organization’s attack surface, ensuring least privilege access helps minimize the risk of insider threats and meet regulatory compliance such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). When onboarding an employee, ensure they’re only given access to the resources they need to do their job. If the employee needs more privileges later on, have them make a case as to why, and only provide the privileges if they relate directly to the employee’s job duties. Giving employees excessive privileges too early on could end up harming your organization, so it’s better to be safe.

4. Equip employees with a password manager

A password manager is a tool that aids with creating, managing, securely storing and sharing passwords. Some password managers also store passkeys, 2FA codes, files, documents and images. Without a password manager, there’s no insight into employee password practices or ways to enforce requirements, meaning there’s a strong chance that employees are using weak passwords and reusing passwords across multiple accounts. This can lead to account compromise attacks that expose company data. 

By equipping employees with a password manager, IT admins will have complete visibility into employee password practices, making it easier to enforce strong password creation and management. When onboarding employees, a password manager also enables them to access all the accounts and systems they’ll need to get started in their new role.

5. Regularly monitor employee activity for unusual behavior

Even after the onboarding process is complete, it’s important to regularly monitor employee activity for suspicious or unusual behavior. Noticing as soon as possible if an employee is doing something that could put your organization at risk can make all the difference in keeping your organization safe. 

Use Keeper® to onboard and offboard employees securely

Securely onboarding employees makes the offboarding process when employees leave more seamless as well. Keeper can help your organization simplify and secure its onboarding and offboarding process by providing IT admins with Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) and delegated administration abilities. When onboarding employees using Keeper, everything an employee needs to get started can be provided to them in their password vault, including login credentials for all the accounts they’ll be using. 

Ready to streamline and secure your organization’s onboarding and offboarding process? Start a free 14-day business trial of Keeper today.