Onboarding

Congratulations on landing that great new hire! You led a great process and you can’t wait to have this new person integrated and sprinting alongside you. Before you dive into day one, it’s important to create an onboarding process that gets them hitting the ground running. Here are some specific steps you can use to manage each step of the onboarding process.

Setting Up a Great First Day

• Plan a welcome event, whether that’s a team lunch, coffee or setting aside a few minutes for self-introductions at the beginning of a company all-hands.
• Post in the team Slack or send an all-staff email ahead of the new hire’s first day to make sure everyone is up to speed and ready to welcome the new team member.
• Consider a welcome package such as company swag or office supplies to make the new hire feel special. Small details go a long way here!
• Add the new hire to any relevant team and company-wide meetings such as all-hands and weekly meetings.

Conceptual Onboarding

• Schedule a company vision session with the new hire. Even though it might have been shared through the interview process, it’s helpful to reshare the company north star, where the company has been and how their work contributes to overall team goals.
• Set up relevant 1:1s for the new hire to get to know the rest of the team. Schedule them ahead of time for the new hire or provide them with a list of names / emails of relevant team members they should reach out to during their first week.

Tactical and Operational Onboarding

• Set up the new hire with a company email.
• Set up the new hire with access to relevant software and tools such as team communication (e.g. Slack, Zoom), documents (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox) and any other tools they’ll be working in (e.g. Hubspot, Salesforce, WordPress). Schedule training sessions for these tools to calibrate on how work gets done.
• Add the new hire to the company payroll and check their I-9 documents.
• Make sure new hires sign relevant compliance documents such as non-disclosure, anti-harassment and cybersecurity forms.
• Work with the new hire to choose and order office equipment (e.g. laptop, monitor, keyboard).
• Create an onboarding guide for the new hire that they can navigate during their own time.

30-60-90 Day Review and Ongoing Career Development

• Set up a 30, 60 and 90 day review. This allows for course corrections and feedback before “business as usual” kicks in. 90-days is enough time to also realize if the hire is not working out as well as you’d hoped – and the opportunity for that conversation has been built in from the start so there are no surprises. 
• Think about what ongoing management, support, and professional development is going to look like for this new team member. The cost of losing great people is significant in terms of time, milestones, and budget, so it’s important to have an organizational strategy for keeping top talent happy and learning while working on your team. A favorite management question to ask regularly is: “what’s getting in your way and how can I support you?”

If you’ve made it this far in the hiring guide, you’re set up to write a compelling job description, identify the right talent and build a great team. We wish you the best of luck in your company-building journey!