A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring -> Part 4: Designing a Stellar Onboarding Program
A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring -> Part 4: Designing a Stellar Onboarding Program
How to build an onboarding program that scales up your new hires faster and retains them for longer
I write a bi-weekly column on leadership, management, and the future of work. In each case, I’ll tackle the questions on the minds of first-time managers, experienced managers, and even executives. I’ll leverage my own experience as a tech leader as well as my network to answer these questions in the most comprehensive, actionable, and accessible way.
Welcome to Part 4 of 4 of my series on “A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring”. As a quick recap, here’s how this guide is organised:
Part 4: Onboard. Setting Up New Hires for Success (← This Post)
When I talk about onboarding, I’m referring to the process of welcoming newcomers (new or existing to the company) and guiding them through a set of formal steps needed to make sure they have the clarity they need to succeed in their new role.
This includes everything from their tech set-up and physical space to understanding why the company does what it does and what everyone contributes towards making it all happen.
Importantly, onboarding is not training (although many organizations conflate the two). While training involves imparting specialized knowledge on how a given process or tool works, onboarding is the process through which an individual is integrated into a team or company. In many cases, there may be some form of training incorporated into onboarding but they are different.
While there is no shortage of stats that speak to the importance of onboarding, the most compelling one I’ve come across is that some 17% of employees leave within the first 3 months while citing a lack of proper onboarding as their number one reason for departing.
If your goal is to retain top talent in the long term, this is one of the most obvious (and easiest) areas to address to move the needle.
This guide lays out the tactical steps you need to take to ensure you’re nailing onboarding and I hope it will play some small part in making your own onboarding experience a great one!
I wanted to give a special thanks to the following who graciously offered their time, insights, and recommendations that helped shape this article: William Laporte (Director Employee Experience at Trackforce Valiant + TrackTik), Amanda Nagy (Global Total Rewards and Benefits Manager at Tailscale), and Sarah Sheikh (Business Operations and People Lead at Moves).
Define Success
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression”
~ Oscar Wilde
In my experience, the most overlooked aspect of the onboarding process is a lack of definition of what success means.
For example, can you answer these questions clearly:
Duration: When does onboarding start? When does onboarding finish?
Process: What steps need to be taken to complete onboarding?
KPI: How do we know if the onboarding was successful?
The typical onboarding process is oriented around a checklist of tasks, rather than goals. In other words, it becomes about completing a list of items within a fixed amount of time (e.g. 1 week) then it is about actually being “onboarded”.
You should not conflate a list of HR tasks (e.g. payroll, benefits sign-up etc) with empowering your new hires with the information they need to succeed.
In my view, the actual goal of being “onboarded” means that you clearly understand your company’s vision and mission, customers, products/services, and the unique role you and your team play in delivering on that mission.
The litmus test is whether you’re confident to put a new hire (no matter what team they’re joining) in front of a customer to pitch your company. If the answer is “no” or “not sure”, then they haven’t been onboarded yet.
As you can imagine, this is hard to do in a day or a week. Yet, over 50% of hiring managers say that their onboarding is a week or less (Source: Career Builder Survey, 2022).
You may well have extreme urgency at your company (particularly if you’ve been looking to hire that person for a long time), but you’re doing your new hire a massive disservice by saying they’ve been onboarded after just a week.
Instead, here’s a better way to think about defining success when it comes to onboarding (and still solving for speed) that’s goal-focused rather than task-focused:
First 30 Days → Small Win: As with so many things in life, it’s all about momentum. The hiring manager should work with the new hire to define a small win that they can deliver well within their first 30 days of joining. This could be a small bug fix for an engineer, a warm lead transfer for a salesperson, or identifying areas of efficiency for a finance lead. The important thing is it comes quickly and is relatively public so that they can quickly establish credibility with the larger team.
Within 60 Days → Mid-Sized Win: This is enough time to be more ambitious and to think through what could be achieved within the first 60 days and work back from there.
Within 90 Days → Big-Win: I’m a big believer that within the first 90 days, a new hire should be able to deliver a big win. This could be anything from landing a new client to shipping a new customer-impacting feature, but if you can point to this it means you’ve successfully incorporated your new hire into the company.
While each “win” will depend on the company and the team you’re joining, by defining success this way there’s an instant focus on urgency and emphasis on applying the knowledge you’re learning (rather than focusing on it as a purely academic or checklist-type exercise).
This also creates an environment where you can learn faster about your new hire and whether or not there’s going to be a long-term track record of success or not.
Build on a Framework that Scales
“It’s even more important to have great onboarding when you’re 50 than when you’re 350”
~ William Laporte, Director of Employee Experience at Trackforce Valiant
While onboarding may sound like a luxury that only large companies can afford, don’t make this mistake. If you’re a small company, each hire you make represents a significant amount of your total leverage as a company and as a result plays a disproportionally large role in your success or failure.
The process of onboarding doesn’t need to be complicated. I would encourage you to build it around a relatively simple framework that blends the right amount of knowledge in each area with the space the person will need to deliver on their “wins”.
In the past, I’ve used the following to do this well:
Administrative Onboarding: Have you met the minimum requirements for them to fulfil their role (e.g. laptop) and to focus on their role (e.g. benefits, payroll)?
Core: Walk them through the “nuts and bolts” of your company, the team they’re joining, and the individual expectations you have of them in this role.
The 3Cs: Infuse the onboarding with what makes you unique as a company and build a feeling with your new hires through your culture, customers, and camaraderie.
Administrative Onboarding
This will be very specific to the company and there’s so much written online about it that I won’t cover this in much detail.
The main thing to keep in mind here is that this is just one part of the onboarding process, not the end goal. It’s also a minimum requirement for a new hire to start focusing on wins so if they don’t have the right tools or system access to do their job, then they’ll be significantly hampered in their ability. It’s sometimes surprising how long and difficult this process can take at some companies.
What’s more, you should make sure you’re very clear with new hires when they’re getting paid, when their benefits start etc. because otherwise they’ll spend their whole time thinking about this rather than on what they were hired to do.
To do this well, I would recommend leveraging a checklist with an aggressive timeline to whip through everything on the list.
Core Onboarding
When it comes to core onboarding, I think of this as the “nuts and bolts” of what new hires will need to know about your company, how it operates, and the role they (and their team) play in making it all happen.
The majority of this information will apply to everyone, but with some nuances as you get more specific to the team and the individual.
In the past, I’ve seen this successfully organized into three areas:
Company: This should typically be run by company leadership and is a great way to give new hires the story behind the company, the vision, mission, and values. Depending on the size of your hiring cohorts you can do these as one-offs or as part of a formal and frequent event.
Team: The hiring manager should ensure they run through a deep-dive of the team they’re joining, how that team fits into the larger organization, what the team is currently working on, and what their goals are for the coming month/quarter. This is often most effectively done visually, where you can walk through an org chart and explain in real-time who does what at the organization.
Individual: This is where the hiring manager takes the time to go through in detail the role, expectations, and goals of the new hire. This is a great opportunity for both the hiring manager and new hire to align on what’s most important and for the new hire to ask any clarifying questions.
This together with the administrative onboarding typically completes what most companies consider to be the traditional “onboarding” process.
However, I would encourage you to consider a third dimension that’s often missed. While it can feel less tangible than the previous two sections, it’s perhaps the most important and won’t magically happen if it’s not encouraged.
Cultural Onboarding
This is more about a feeling than anything. While you can complete the previous steps, you also want your new hire to feel something about the company, the mission, and the team they’re joining.
To do this, I leverage the “3Cs”:
Culture: Involve your new hire as early as possible in as many of the company or team cultural events that you organize. This could be anything from “game night” to books that your team loves to read or recommend. The sooner that they start to feel like an “insider” and not an “outsider” the more successful they’ll be.
Customers: This is often overlooked, but customers are a great way to anchor the “why” you do what you do. They are a powerful way to align as well as inspire a team and you should make the most of this opportunity. I’ve had new hires get on phone calls with customers to understand why they use our product (or listen to previously recorded calls/videos) as well as send them the products these customers make as a welcome gift.
Camaraderie: As the hiring manager, you’ll want to foster and encourage camaraderie early on. This can be especially difficult when teams are remote, so if it’s consistent with your company culture I would encourage you to get everyone together as early as possible. If it’s not possible, then setting up intros with key team members and inserting the new hire in projects mid-stream where you think they can add value will go a long way to helping this early on. You want to create healthy “collisions” early on between team members.
Communicate Early, Often
“Even the transition from offer to actual onboarding, it’s really important to keep communication flowing. The further out someone is from starting the more important it is to have regular touch points.”
~ Amanda Nagy, Global Total Rewards and Benefits Manager at Tailscale
A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is to minimize surprises when it comes to onboarding. There should be very few (if any) surprises for new hires when they join your company. This means everything from the big and obvious (who they report to) to the small and perhaps less obvious (when they should come to the office on Day 1) needs to be detailed and outlined to each new hire.
I was once in an early morning meeting when someone walked into the room and introduced themselves. I had no idea who this person was or what they were doing in the meeting, but later learned they had been hired for one of the open roles at the company.
The problem was no one had any idea and this person immediately got that impression, despite our attempt at “winging it”. I can’t imagine a worse onboarding impression than being excited on your first day only to walk into a room full of people who don’t know who you are or why you were there. What’s more, this was a relatively senior hire and therefore highly impactful to a range of different cross-functional teams (including my own).
Perhaps not surprisingly, this person left within their first year.
The good news is this can be solved by clear communication with the candidate before and after they join the company. There are a few core communications I recommend sending, although this is by no means a complete list:
New Hire Packet: This should be sent as quickly as possible post-signing and include everything they would need to know about joining (first day, where to go etc.) as well as basic onboarding information (e.g. payroll, benefits). Ideally, this should also include a calendar for their first few weeks. You should look to have this person’s first week (at least) fully booked and orientated around as quick and as smooth a process as possible. There’s nothing worse than an empty calendar, especially if you’re remote.
Welcome Email/Slack: This should be sent by the hiring manager either a week before or (at the latest) the morning of Day 1. It should articulate why they’re excited about them joining, what they’ll be doing, who they’ll be working with, and include any key cross-functional leaders. I typically did this the week before so it would give everyone lots of context and get the person excited. More often than not, there’s a “love bomb” response from everyone to the individual about how excited they are to have them.
“Working with Me” document: As a leader, I’ve leveraged this time and again as a way of setting expectations with new hires and cutting through the formality of when someone new joins. I use it as a way of clarifying how I work, including my management style and preferred methods of communication. Depending on who they’ve reported to before, they may be used to a very different type of leader (e.g. hands-on vs. hands-off, Email vs. Slack etc) and therefore it’s a good opportunity to share that all up-front. It should also be a two-way street and when your report is comfortable it’s helpful to get them to share their style and what works best for them.
Key Company/Team Artefacts: It’s also helpful to share recent decks or memos that your team has produced including past All-hands to give this new hire context on what’s been going on.
Peer pairing (aka “Buddy System”)
This is often a feature of most onboarding programs, but I wanted to reiterate the importance of having some formal process for pairing someone new with someone who knows the company well. While I dislike the term “buddy system”, because it makes it sound unimportant, I digress.
The reality is you’ll have plenty of gaps in your onboarding process - no matter how good - and what a peer pairing program can do is both create a fail-safe for anything that falls between the cracks and create a safe space for someone to ask seemingly obvious questions without any fear of looking uninformed.
For that reason, I would suggest pairing your new hire with someone from an adjacent team and having them set up formal meetings at least a few times within their first 30 days.
Onboarding New Leaders
While most onboarding should be relatively standardized, I would recommend several extra steps when onboarding new leaders.
When you onboard a new leader you are instantly entrusting a team (sometimes large, sometimes small) of people to take their direction from this person. We know from all the data that managers have a disproportionate influence on team engagement and therefore you’re either going to drive their engagement up (or down) with this new leader.
For this reason, you’ll want them to have everything they need to succeed because their success (or lack thereof) is factors (i.e. New Hire x Number of Direct and Indirect Reports) more important than just onboarding a single person with no team.
Here are a few things to consider:
People/HR: The CPO or senior people leader should give a walkthrough of the core people elements the company runs on (e.g. interviewing, hiring process, feedback style) as well as a walkthrough of recent employee engagement surveys. There is a lot of context here that should be shared early with any new leader.
Finance: Deep dive walkthrough of financials by CFO or senior finance leader to give a grounding of where the company is to plan and what sort of latitude they have within their current budget. The new leader will likely almost instantly be asked questions related to budget and the more informed (and empowered) they are the better that initial trust meter will build.
Coaching/Feedback: This can be done by HR (or an external coach) but it’s important early on for any new leader to receive a steady stream of feedback from across the organisation (peers, reports etc). This is important because you don’t want people sitting on feedback just because they are new or there is a real (or perceived) power imbalance. What’s more, as the company you’ll want to make sure that this new leader is exactly as advertised and running the team in a way you would expect. This information will go a long way to course-correcting behaviours or providing the context needed to make a quick decision on an early exit.
Feedback Loop
Similar to the above feedback loop for new leaders, every onboarding program should have a clear mechanism where feedback is collected to improve the overall system.
There are two critical feedback loops you need to create:
Feedback for the new hires: Too often, early feedback is missed that could have course-corrected behaviours that were inconsistent with the company’s expectations. While you’ll get some hiring decisions wrong, there should be a documented way for new hires to get feedback in a non-confrontational way that helps them improve rather than create a situation where the organization writes them off. In the past, I’ve sometimes engaged HR to run a few calls to collect this and then share it back anonymously. In my experience, this exercise typically yields very positive feedback and therefore has the effect of emboldening this new hire even more. If the feedback is anything but positive, you can immediately become more hands-on to better understand and support.
Feedback for the company: While many companies run onboarding feedback surveys, it can sometimes be challenging to get impartial feedback here from people who are both new to the company and in the “honeymoon” period. If you want to improve the onboarding process, it’s typically better to ask cross-functional team members how well you think new hires were onboarded (e.g. ask engineering if the product hire was onboarded well or vice versa) or to look at the win columns for the 30/60/90 days of new hires. If you’ve hired 5 people in the last 30 days and you can’t point to very many wins these news hires have had, then there’s likely something wrong with your onboarding process.
A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring
That’s it! You’ve now read the last part of this 4-part series. If you’re interested in what came before, here’s a quick re-cap:
Part 4: Onboard. Setting Up New Hires for Success (← This Post)
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