New starter form

Our new starter information form ensures you obtain all the relevant personal details that you need on day one of the employment. Make sure you ask the employee to check it's still up to date at least annually and, in any event, encourage them to notify you of changes on an ongoing basis.

Day one information

When an employee first starts work for you, as well as ensuring you have their P45 and proof of eligibility to work in the UK, you should ask them for certain personal information to hold on your personnel records.  This is where our New Starter Form comes in. It’s designed to glean all the information you need, including:

• full name and home address
• NI number
• date of birth
• contact information for in case you need to get in touch with the employee out of work time or in an emergency, i.e. home and mobile phone numbers and personal e-mail address
• bank account details - you'll need this for salary payment/payroll purposes
• details of two emergency contacts, including their name and address, relationship to the employee and telephone contact numbers - again, you should gather this data for use in the event of an emergency involving the employee.

There’s also a box for you to record their main job details - the department and location where they work, their job title and employment start date.

Data protection

Once you've gathered this information and placed the form on the employee's personnel file, don't just leave it there forever! It constitutes personal data and one of the data protection principles in the UK GDPR is that "personal data shall be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date". So, we recommend you ask your employees to review the form on at least an annual basis. Hopefully, if any of the details have changed, they will have notified you on an ongoing basis anyway, but employees can forget, or even deliberately fail, to disclose an important change in their personal circumstances. You can also use our Change of Circumstances Form here to issue to staff to actively "encourage" them to notify you of changes as and when they happen, rather than as part of the annual review.