The on-boarding process for new hires can often be fraught with confusion. A neat way to help a new hire keep track of all their tasks upon joining the company would be to setup a Tasks SharePoint list within their My Site. Then all you need to tell them is to go to their My Site and they'll see all the tasks they need to perform their first couple days on the job (signing W4s, direct deposit, etc.). The following post walks you through how to setup a Tasks list on every new hire's My Site, as well as pre-populating that list with tasks.
The journey starts within ONET.XML file in the SPSPERS site definition within the SharePoint 12 hive: 
This ONET file is an XML definition file that is used once, upon instantiation of the new My Site. Inside, we can specify what lists to create, what features to activate, data to upload/populate, and so forth.
Notice on line 83, the open Lists element. This is the block of XML that defines what SharePoint lists to instantiate upon creation of the site and is where we will add the reference to the new Tasks list. By default there are three lists that are being created, Personal Documents, Shared Documents, and Shared Pictures.
Paste the following line of XML within the "Lists" block:
<List FeatureId="00BFEA71-A83E-497E-9BA0-7A5C597D0107" Type="107" Title="My Tasks" Url="mytasks" QuickLaunchUrl="lists/mytasks/AllItems.aspx"></List>
The List tag has a FeatureID and Type tags; these correspond to the Tasks list definition that is defined within the TasksList feature (12/TEMPLATE/FEATURES/TaskList). For simplicity I removed the $Resource elements and replaced them with common English equivalents (on my example I leave them in for language compatibility purposes).
To get the task list pre-populated with tasks, add the following Data elements within the List element:
<Data>
<Rows>
<Row>
<Field Name="Title">Welcome to the RBA Family! Please read this first.</Field>
<Field Name="Body">Body Text.<Field>
</Row>
<Row>
<Field Name="Title">Sign and return all new hire paperwork to HR.</Field>
<Field Name="Body">W4, Direct Deposit Form, Parking Permit, etc.</Field>
</Row>
</Rows>
</Data>
This XML will generate two tasks upon creation of the Site. More fields can be specified here if desired.
The last step is to get the Tasks list to show up on the home page of the new employee's My Site to help them find the Tasks list easily. To do this, scroll down to the Modules section and edit the default.aspx module. Replace the personal site welcome web part with a new ListViewWebPart that is a view into our new Tasks list.
Figure 2: Delete the default welcome web part...
Replace the selected all users web part with this View tag:
<View List="lists/mytasks" BaseViewID="0" WebPartZoneID="MiddleLeftZone" WebPartOrder="1" />
This will drop a new ListViewWebPart showing the new employee's tasks at the very top of the My Site.
Figure 3: Working example
[Download my ONET.XML file if you can't get it to work (Right click, "Save target as").]
Phil