Onboarding Best Practices

Welcome to 📈🧠 Scale Smarter.

Forwarded this email? Sign up here.

🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• How to lead a scaling business (Wired)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• The rise of the ‘augmented’ startup founder (The Next Web)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• It's official — nearly all of us are much more productive when we work from home (Tech Radar)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• Track projects, reporting, and invoices in one place with Harvest (PCMag)

💡 Hiring Insights

• Skills-based hiring done right: Practical tips for employers (EU-Startups)

👀 ICYMI

• Level up with these delegation tips for you and your team (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

✅ Onboarding simplified with a checklist

From their first interaction with your employees to how welcome they feel when they start their new job...

Onboarding new hires will always be one of the most crucial events that takes place in your company.

How you set your employees up for success on their first day is truly how you set your company up for success in the long run.

With the right processes in place for new employees, you’re not only doing them a favor on their first day, but you’re also doing your whole company a favor. When everyone knows what to expect while new employees onboard, you’re likely to see the whole process run as smooth as a 4 second pit stop.

Once all of the HR admin work is out of the way, onboarding becomes easier with a straightforward checklist.

Device and access set up

Your goal is to get your employees working as soon as possible, for both your benefit and theirs. While having a pre-loaded laptop ready to use gives the new employee something to work with immediately, it also shows them that your company is well organized and ready for them to join.

Welcome email

It’s amazing what something so simple as a welcome email can do for new employees. Remember the first day of a new school where you walked hesitantly around not exactly knowing where to go? This is your new employee. A well-informed welcome email on what to expect in the coming days and weeks mitigates any confusion for new hires.

Pro Tip: If you’re in an office, I like to share info about parking, “dress code” and great spots close by for lunch to put them at ease their first day.

Introduction to the team

Your introduction to the team should give the new person a good perspective on not only the company’s culture but the subculture within the team. This is also a great opportunity to not only highlight who they will be working with on a daily basis but other employees, including senior leaders, that they might cross paths with.

Establish clear job expectations

The last thing you want is an employee sitting at their workstation not knowing what to do. Be as prescriptive as you can with what they need to work on and what their goals should be with a clear cut 30/60/90 day outlook.

Assign a mentor/buddy

Some of the best onboarding experiences I’ve seen included a buddy system. It just creates this extra layer of comfort for the new hire to ask questions and make comments being the new person.

Set up meetings with key stakeholders & projects

This is not to say you want your new hires drinking by the fire hose from the moment they start. But having them involved in meetings early on will give them an immediate sense of belonging and purpose. Plus it’s always nice for them to know who exactly they’ll be working with.

Regular check-ins and feedback

One of the most important, if not the most important things you can do with new employees is check in on them regularly for at least the first week. This is the easiest point for any necessary course corrections with the new hire. It’s also a time to gather valuable feedback on how their onboarding process went.

Pro Tip: As a manager, I always scheduled 15-min meetings at the end of the day every day the first week to check in, answer questions and make sure they’re settling in.

🤝 Cross-company engagement through onboarding

As important as it is for new employees to go through a smooth and well organized onboarding process, it’s just as important for it to feel like something everyone actually wants to experience.

Onboarding should also be something that your current employees take pride in, realizing this is not only a reflection of the company, but also them as individuals who form the teams your new employee will work with.

As an example, at AirBnB it’s encouraged that employees personalize the experience for the new hire as much as possible to make them feel welcome. AirBnB also encourages the new hire to stay at an AirBnB to truly immerse themselves in the culture and experience that makes AirBnB a company.

Meanwhile, Netflix’s “welcome home” philosophy for new hires makes them feel like they’re part of the team immediately. New employees receive a welcome package of various branded items including a cozy Netflix-branded blanket, creating a sense of warmth and comfort in their job from the very beginning.

Lastly at Zappos, a company famously branded as a “customer service company that just so happens to sell shoes”, by the late CEO Tony Hsieh, all new hires, no matter what their actual job will be, start by answering customer calls during their training period. New hires are often offered money to quit, which subsequently weeds out who is serious about the job and who is not. Employees finish off their onboarding experience with a graduation party with their colleagues.

📊 Measuring the success of your onboarding process

Like most founders and business leaders, you’re continuously trying to grow your business and so understanding how successful your onboarding process is will tell you how much additional time you need spend on new hires versus the overall business.

But in order better understand how your onboarding process is going, and subsequently where you should be spending your time, feedback and data is needed.

As they say, what gets measured, gets managed.

New hire surveys

There is all kinds of data points you can get with employee satisfaction surveys. The key is to ensure your questions are directed to the elements of your onboarding process to ensure you get feedback you can use.

Track time to productivity

A great onboarding experience culminates with an employee being fully acclimated into their job in an efficient amount of time that you define. Tracking time to productivity or TTP will give you a view of how quick an employee became integrated with their team and fully functional in their job.

Measure turnover

Employee turnover rates can give you some key insights into your onboarding processes. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, effective onboarding improves retention rates by 52%, with longterm outcomes being job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

Performance reviews for managers

Not only is it important to survey new hires on how their experience was with onboarding, it’s also important to have a pulse on who is actually doing the onboarding. Monitoring performance metrics with managers can give you the root cause to how good or bad the process goes

The onboarding experience is only as good as the people who manage it.

Bonus: New hire refresh

After the first 30 days, I always ask the employee to give feedback on the onboarding process. Then I ask them to make updates to improve it as an early project. Now you have a scalable way to continue leveling up your process.

A great onboarding experience is like a fine tuned assembly line, with each employee in that line contributing to help the new hire get the most out of their experience in joining your company.

🎬 TL;DR—Your Actions For The Week:

• Scaling Your Startup: Simplify your onboarding process with a checklist

• Scaling Yourself: Use data to reduce the time spent on monitoring the success of your onboarding

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help:

💼 Hiring? I built an expert bench of recruiters from companies like Uber, Amazon & Spotify to run the full recruiting process for you. We’re on-demand, can flex up & down, and there are zero commissions or hidden fees—Learn more here.