Thorough Onboarding

You would think that after a company/team makes the massive investment in fighting for headcount, defining a role, drafting a JD, sourcing candidates, going through an impossibly long recruiting process and extending and offer that the least they could do would be to make good on that investment with providing as thorough of an onboarding experience as possible. You'd almost always be incorrect.

We see countless reasons why this may be the case. One of the most obvious is the exact counterargument to what we explain above — after making such a massive financial and temporal investment, teams are desperate to turn around and immediately harvest some ROI with their employee. The onboarding is merely another roadblock between them and their newest hire's future achievements. One of the most common is that companies who are scaling at a certain pace simply haven't set the time aside with their leaders/HR/L&D representation to think about new employee experience. Another we've seen is that even when companies have dedicated resources to thinking through onboarding process, even when executives do want to slow down and make good on that investment — their strategies flat entirely flat when they have anything less than 100% buy in from every level of management.

The effects of a 'skimmed' onboarding are often detrimental. You're starting your new hire's experience off on a bad foot. Their experience will suffer, their morale will suffer, they'll be less effective in their role, they'll be slower to hit that productivity milestone and that will spread faster across their team than you could possibly imagine.

We're so passionate about revitalizing recruiting and onboarding processes because we think that in some ways, it is the single most critical moment in any employee's tenure. Obviously they'll go on to accomplish bigger and better things for their organizations, we just think a vast majority of that will be informed by how it was they were introduced to the company they represent.

All of this is to say, if you anticipate your onboarding process will be nonexistent, rushed or lackluster, ESPECIALLY if you're not being hired explicitly to improve said process, then consider the flag red.