Why is a thorough employee onboarding program important? 

It’s your new hire’s first real impression of your company – you’ve already gone through the courting and recruiting process, and now you get to show them what actually being an employee means. Putting time and intention into the onboarding is important to give new hires a great first impression.

30% of hires leave their new organization in the first 6 months—a terrifying figure for business leaders because many employees might leave before they’re fully ramped up. A primary reason employees cite for leaving is an inadequate onboarding process. If they don’t know what’s required to do their job correctly or how to be successful, they may begin to wonder why they’re even there. 

How might you structure your onboarding process at a Seed-Series A company, where you’re hiring a few employees per quarter?

Before structuring the program, establish your goals – why are you thinking about putting time and energy into onboarding? What do you want to accomplish with your onboarding? For example, if your goal for new hire training is to make sure the hires connect with the business and people they’ll be working with, then you know you need to skew towards live interaction. 

You need to ensure a new hire’s few days are planned (even if they’re starting solo) – if you aren’t big enough to have cohorts, you want to make sure that new hires leave on the first day with a positive impression that they matter and you’ve approached onboarding with care. 

Find the right balance between solo work and live training time – you likely have people stagger-starting through the quarter, so you probably can’t do a bunch of individual live onboarding meetings. Evaluate what they can do solo, and then consider when to drip in human interaction from the team, manager, and leadership.

How should you treat the period between the date of the offer and the first day of onboarding? What communication should you have with new hires before their first day?

Set expectations and provide a plan for the first week – it’s reassuring to arrive and know what the first day will look like, with a loose agenda for the first week. Let them know anything they’ll need to do the first week. If you don’t, people will fill that information void with scary thoughts. Create a calming experience for them as they start in a new place.

Tell them when they’ll get the necessary tools – before they arrive, make sure they know when they’ll get their computer and any other necessary implements to do their job. It’s also a good time to send them some company swag. 

Keep in touch, but don’t start assigning work – giving a new hire a ton of work to do between the offer and when they start doesn’t set a great tone. But leaving them completely alone can lead to pre-onboarding attrition, especially when they have other offers on the table. Seek to make them feel welcome and excited.

How might you structure your onboarding process at a larger, later-stage company, where you’re consistently bringing in new employees every month?

Best practices remain best practices, regardless of size – much of what works for smaller companies applies equally as you grow. It might become more standardized as you get big enough to create onboarding cohorts.

Business structure and time zones determine how you schedule cohort activities – if you have many disparate time zones, you might do 5 short days of cohort onboarding, where the cohort spends half the day in live sessions and half doing independent work. If your new hires are mostly local or in the same time zone, you might plan 3 full days of cohort agenda items.

Onboarding is becoming more virtual – before the pandemic, flying in employees for onboarding was more common. New hire experiences are now becoming virtual, which isn’t a negative as long as the experience is engaging and not “death by PowerPoint”. 

Acknowledge new hires when you are in-person – in-person is always fun, but not always realistic. A lot of bigger companies are now doing a once-a-year whole-company gathering. That offsite is an opportunity to introduce new hires, for instance, you might have those hired in the last six months stand up.

Introduce new hires to the rest of the company – even if you’re virtual, if you have 27 new hires this month, drop a PDF into slack with a little snippet on each or call them out in an all-hands. Then, employees will know to be warm and welcoming if they interact with them. It’s a healthy culture to set. 

What are the different new hiring training formats that are available, and when should you use each?

Virtual Instructor Led Training (VILT) or in-person training  – there’s a live person leading a training over Zoom or Teams video, or in person. These offer the opportunity for the most engagement but can be more difficult to pull off if you’re a smaller company without onboarding cohorts. They shouldn’t be “talking at” learners or PowerPointing them to death. Good live training involves breakouts where participants are asked to apply their knowledge. 

Self-paced learning – this can include eLearning, content in an LMS or a company Wiki, or watching videos to hit your learning goals. Self-paced learning resources are helpful to support live sessions, and for lower stakes, less intensive knowledge so that learners may return to it when needed.

Roundtable discussions – the cohort comes together to discuss a topic, with a facilitator to guide the conversation and offer prompts. 

Lunch and Learn – a group watches a piece of prepared content like a video or a presentation over the lunch hour, then discuss what they’ve learned from it and how they’ve received it.

Panels – in person or virtual, thought leaders in or outside the company have a discussion with an audience, then questions can be posed at the end. 

Which modality you choose depends on the depth of knowledge required for understanding – Bloom’s Taxonomy for learning tells us that the desired use case for knowledge should determine the instruction. If you want the cohort to produce an in-depth application of knowledge, and extrapolate something new or strategize based on what they learn, a three-minute video won’t suffice; and multiple modalities may be needed. If you just need to show people where to reference something, you can have self-paced, less involved learning. 

How can you design training that works great virtually?

Spend the time to make live training recordings digestible  – a good VILT usually includes breakouts and a lot of engagement so that a recording won’t do it justice. If you take the content in a VILT and make a crisp recording with voiceover, then break that up into one-to-three-minute videos with activities, you can do it more justice. Good live training should be so engaging, with so much dialogue, that listening to it without post-production would feel annoying. 

Chunk out the content to work in common timeslots. Schedule group activities for whatever overlap exists between time zones; then, you can have one time zone handle self-paced learning in the morning, and the other do it at night. 

Use a tool to find good times across time zones – e.g. World Time Buddy, to help you find a time that works in everyone’s time zones. Still, You may have to run parallel experiences; if you have employees in Eastern, Pacific, Australian, and European time zones, there is no time that will work for everyone. 

What topics should be covered for every employee (regardless of function) during onboarding?

Welcome and intro – greet them and express that you’re glad they’re here. Treat them with the grace you would when meeting anyone for the first time. Then, provide them an agenda for the week, and expectations to ground them in context and a plan. 

Who we are – cover your core values, provide a company timeline, and introduce hires to the leadership team. This could be handled with a short video from the leadership team where they introduce themselves and talk a bit about the company.

What we care about internally and externally – explain your core values and mission, and how the company lives those values internally. Then, cover what you care about that’s external to the company, including caring for and servicing customers. What is the customer journey and how are all of the departments woven in? If an employee exemplifies a core value, have them make a video explaining what their story and what that value means to them.

Intro to HR and People team – how are they here to support employees? Introduce the key characters hires will interact with, and cover any policies they need to know about. 

Tech and security introduction – help the new hire with tools, a VPN, and anything else that’s technically relevant.

Intro to industry, market, acquisitions, and competitors (linked to product 101) – who are the industries that you work with? What is the market need for your solution and what prompted the founders to create the product? Also give an intro to any prior acquisitions, because usually there are breadcrumbs left from the previous company.

Product 101 – show customer use cases and testimonials to make the session as tangible as possible. Product and engineering can get over excited and go way too deep, make sure they just cover a level of complexity that the new hire needs to do their job well.  Introduce your competitors (without bashing them) by showing the product sets they have and the relative benefits of your product.

Team building – a QA with the founder can go a long way to building a connection with the company; as can a time and space for the cohort to connect with each other in a social setting. 

Function/value-specific stint, shadowing, or day-in-the-life – if you have time, it can be an amazing way to trade places, see how the other functions live, and learn about teams you’ll be working together with. An easy way to cover this is with an all hands where each department presents for 15 minutes on a ‘day in the life’. It can then be recorded and shared with future new hires.

Who should be responsible for collecting and maintaining the information for company-wide onboarding? How do you ensure that onboarding info stays up-to-date? 

Someone on the people team (if you have one) should maintain the materials- one person should be responsible for corralling people and prompting the collection and maintenance of the information. If you have a People team, they are best positioned to do that. 

Without a people team, assign a leader and share the burden of collection across leadership –  each department needs an initiative with time and energy to fill in and update onboarding information. At a small company, this can be a stretch opportunity for someone to help maintain that until the company is ready to hire an external vendor or FTE to handle it. Or, it might be assigned to the office manager or executive assistant. Whoever it is, one person needs to monitor and orchestrate the collection of information. 

Emphasize to all functions that they’re responsible for sharing and refreshing information – even when you have a people team, it’s the whole company’s responsibility to ensure a solid repository of resources for new hires. The People team can’t replicate the knowledge of functional managers who are on the ball. 

Make sure the materials and the repository are mutable – you need to be able to change information in your repository on the fly. This applies both to the storage location for resources and the resources themselves.  Don’t invest a lot of money on professional videos and recordings if you expect them to change soon after.

What tools can help you with storing and disseminating knowledge? When can G-Suite work and when do you need an LMS?

Start with something affordable and easy to change (Slides or Sheets) – early on, you only need a tool that’s cheap, easy to access, and easy to change. 

As your onboarding program gets bigger and more complex, move to eLearning/LMS – when you have a more mature onboarding program with more moving parts, it might make sense to upgrade to an LMS to help you track and manage your resources. 

How should you check for understanding of trainings and materials during onboarding?

The post-training period is as important as the training – our brains are designed to purge information we don’t use. The “forgetting curve” is a real thing and it’s important to consider that learning is an active sport. You can’t use a board deck to train new hires, because the way we best process and retain information differs based on how we use it. 

Identify and reinforce the most important learnings and skills in a training – if you want new hires to be able to locate the product roadmap in the Wiki, list core product features, and give an elevator pitch on your product at the end of Product 101 module, those are three things you should emphasize and measure at the end of training. These are your learning outcomes and should be measurable. 

Check for understanding by having employees act on what they learned – the best way to check for understanding is to ask them to put their learnings to use. At the end of trainings, go into breakout rooms and task new hires with activities based on the training’s goals.

Use surveys to collect qualitative and quantitative data on the new-hire experience – surveys are helpful in reinforcing lessons and checking for understanding. You can align them closely with desired goals or outcomes of onboarding. Google Forms or Quia are great testing tools; Quia even gives respondents the correct answers if they get it wrong. There are two different types of learning goals to check for: 

• Learning outcomes – extremely measurable skills like being able to locate and summarize information.

• Learning goals – deep understanding of content and its application that are more difficult to quantify. A goal might be to have employees understand why we’re in business or what your core values are. Instead of testing for regurgitation, you might just ask new hires to rate their understanding of learning goals, or have write-ins asking them to summarize a topic. 

Create a baseline and compare the performance of your program over time – do a baseline test before you launch the onboarding program, then compare it to the results after they’ve gone through your program. Usually, you’ll see data tick up and to the right. You can also use this to measure how changes to your onboarding program affect learning results. 

What does function-specific training need to cover?

It will depend on the specific function – a technical employee is going to need a lot more time on the product’s technical details than a salesperson does. Functional leaders would design and run relevant functional onboarding activities.

There may be some knowledge relevant across customer-facing roles – e.g. sales, CS, etc, Common onboarding topics include:

• Customer journey

• Language you can use to communicate about the product

• Language you can use to overcome objections

• How to handle customer issues or cancellation

For functions with only one or a few employees, training will be less standard – for onboarding roles like engineering, finance, and legal, onboarding gets trickier. They may be only one of two people doing the job so there aren’t onboarding materials built out, or they might be the first hire in that function. 

• If there are others in the role – a new-hire buddy is really valuable when documentation is thin.

• If no one has ever done the job at this company – make sure the new hire knows what questions they have, because their onboarding will need to be somewhat self-directed. Assign a manager or leader to respond to their inquiries. 

Start function-specific training immediately after company-wide – there shouldn’t be a day in between your general company-wide onboarding, and function-specific training. If your company-wide “101” ends at Noon, start the function-specific onboarding at 1 PM. The sooner the better, so that the hires can ramp up and apply their knowledge as quickly as possible. 

How can the People Function ensure that functional trainers are meeting onboarding expectations? 

The People Function should clarify desired learning outcomes to trainers – you might have technical geniuses who love talking about their area and want to get deep in the weeds with new hires. The People Function has to corral them, help to identify the learning outcomes of the training, and give feedback so that all of your trainings are geared towards hitting objectives and you don’t overwhelm new hires with extraneous information. 

Ask new trainers to do a ‘mock’ onboarding – the People leader might sit down with onboarding session leaders beforehand and have them do a dry run. From there you can give feedback, set expectations, and give direction to ensure that the sessions are as effective as possible. 

Review materials that trainers create – if a functional trainer makes a video, review it before sharing it with new hires. The learning and development function should be glorified interpreters to take the great in-depth and complicated knowledge within your organization, and pull out and communicate it in a way that everyone can understand. 

How long should onboarding last? 

The New Hire Experience ends when you consider new hires entirely ramped – the training period might be contained in a week or two, but the new hire experience doesn’t end when training ends. Until the employee is ramped, they need to be considered a flight risk. You need employees to be ramped and ready to put in time and energy to protect your investment in them. 

Usually, the formal onboarding period lasts 90 days – at this point, the handholding experience should be winding down and they could even be a new hire buddy for another person.

What are the most important pieces to get right? 

Create clear learning goals and constantly review the the onboarding program's alignment—you need to know what you want to accomplish, or you won’t succeed. Without a goal, benchmark, or OKR, you’ll never be able to evaluate your success. Managers need to know what’s expected of them. 

Align the whole leadership team on the importance of onboarding and learning goals – onboarding can’t be a side project from people, teams, vendors, and managers. The importance of the new hire experience and the goals need to be supported from the top to ensure everyone in the business knows how important it is that new hires feel welcome, ramp quickly, and can be a cultural addition (not just a fit).

Make the experience engaging – if you’re bringing people into a live environment, it needs to be engaging. There are plenty of ways to get new hires engaged in their learning, buy in, and get an active feel for your organization right away. 

What are common pitfalls? 

Not providing an agenda, organization, or program – if the new hire begins and they don’t have a laptop, any meetings on their calendar, email, or structure, they won’t know what they need to do to be successful. Say a new hire begins and their manager is on vacation, you need to find a replacement. If you don’t, you’re not protecting your investment in the employee or showing you take their experience seriously. 

Thinking you’re “done” after the hire accepts – when you hire people, you’re nowhere near done. It’s a delicate period that you need to put time and energy into. 

Leaving onboarding up to a single person – there has to be company-wide energy and initiative to get the new hires onboarded. The People function can’t provide them with an enriching experience.