How to Ace the Employee Onboarding Process

In the dark alley knife fight for qualified talent, you’ve won! They’ve chosen you and your organization to join, focus their energy on and make their next contributions to! Now don’t blow your first chance to show that they’ve made 100% the right decision. Starting day one, your processes should demonstrate that they made the best possible choice for their career in joining your startup. Culture is in the details of what you do, and how you treat your staff everyday and companies with great culture attract amazing talent by word of mouth. The following are the best ways to think through how you set your company apart.

First and foremost: Be who you said you were going to be. Few things are more disappointing and discouraging than the realization that the job you thought you were hired into is totally different than what you're actually doing. Similarly, nothing is worse than showing up excited about a company only to find that the “culture” you heard so much about doesn’t exist. Inadvertently misrepresenting your employee's new role or the workplace you offer destroys trust in you immediately, after which no amount of culture orientation or rehabilitation efforts can undo those first impressions.

Provide Variety and Balance. The first day is stressful for all parties involved. You, as a manager are taken away from other work obligations as you focus on getting a new employee up to speed. For the newbie, the 1:1 focused attention can be overwhelming as they also try and understand a whole new ecosystem of information, all new coworkers and systems. Do yourself a favor: vary the first day's schedule by including a variety of informal interactions between meetings. Arrange for one or a group of the team to treat the new hire to lunch on the first day to provide a little non-meeting relief and levity. Have the new employee start later that the team usually arrives and /or leave early to enable those that are training to also have a chance to tend to other obligations that will arise during the day. Set expectations for arrival and departure times the first week.

 Have relevant paperwork ready. Providing a list of the items that the employee would need to bring on their first day in advance puts a lot of nerves at ease and can expedite the process. Nevertheless, paperwork and administrative blah blah blahs still are the bane of the new hire process. Make sure all admin and compliance forms—such as employment, non-disclosure, direct deposit, and benefits—are ready to be completed on day one so you don't have to waste time dealing with it later, and so that your employee can start getting other important matters taken care of right away. Even better, provide the forms electronically that they can fill out in advance and then you only need to do minimal compliance verification on the first day. Nothing kills the enthusiasm for getting started like hours of mindless paperwork. 

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