How To Create An Onboarding Machine
I’ve hired well over 500 people throughout my career.
Before running my first business, onboarding a new hire was whatever awkward process the big Fortune 500 company laid out. New hires floundered with the process, trying hard to maintain their excitement about their new roles.
When I started running my first company, I noticed the difference it made when we invested heavily in onboarding a new hire.
They not only bought into our vision but also made an impact within the business sooner.
By looking at onboarding differently, we realized we could use this process to help increase success rates instead of just dumping information on them.
Two things were important to me: One, we could reduce the dreaded six-month hiring process, and two, our new hires weren’t easily lured by competitors.
This realization meant we had to rethink onboarding, seeing it from the perspective of new hires.
Today we'll walk through how to build an onboarding machine to accelerate how quickly a new hire makes an impact.
Let’s dive in.
Employees are Customers
If you believe in your employees, invest heavily in them. Otherwise, don’t hire them. Your biggest returns will come from increasing their odds of success - just as you would with a customer.
Customer onboarding is intentional, ensuring a smooth experience. We anticipate customer questions and fears. If done well, your customers will stay longer, buy more, and support you with word-of-mouth referrals.
Applying the same intentional approach to your employees yields powerful results.
New jobs are always stressful. Great employees want to do well from the very start but they'll likely fail if you ask them to “just dive in” on Day 1 without context.
When I think about creating an onboarding machine, my goal is to accelerate the time for a new employee to make an impact in the company. Instead of it being a six-month process, I plan for six weeks.
To do that, we’ll need to utilize the timeframe between an offer being accepted and their first day to help us build momentum with our new team member. We’ll do a little prep by thinking ahead about what will increase our new hire’s success rate.
Our onboarding machine has two critical phases: Foundation Building and Operational Mastery.
Phase 1: Foundation Building
The Foundation Building phase is all about laying the groundwork for a successful entry into the company. It’s where we roll out the red carpet, not just making new hires feel welcome, but also instilling a deep sense of trust and belonging from the start.
During this phase, we focus on three key areas:
Over-Communicate What To Expect
Accelerate Relationship Building
Outline Clear Job Expectations: The First 90 Days
Throughout this phase, I keep information succinct.
I look for areas where I can show genuine excitement about them joining our company, but more importantly, I look for opportunities to build trust.
I want to make it painless to succeed in a challenging role.
To do that, I need to trust they are the right fit for the role, and in turn, I need to make sure I do everything I can to help them feel like a valuable part of the team in the shortest amount of time.
Over-Communicate What To Expect
Once an offer is accepted, onboarding begins.
I use the window between the offer being accepted and their first day to help them prepare for their new role. Through an email drip campaign, I slowly share company information while building excitement for their first day.
Here’s a high-level outline of what our onboarding email drip campaign looks like for someone starting four weeks from accepting an offer.
Day 0: Welcome To The Team
Day 1: Sign New Employee Forms Digitally
Day 7: Meet The Team & Onboarding Schedule
Day 14: What To Expect Your First Week
Day 18: Scheduled Lunch Dates With Your Peers
Day 20: Set up Gmail, Notion, and Slack so they can start to “observe” before their first day
Day 24: Individual Intros To Peers
Day 27: Your First Day
One thing to note here is that these aren’t emails dumping information on them.
The info should be relevant and in small bits.
Basically, we're trying to help them feel like they already work here by giving them a clear idea of what to expect.
Outline Clear Expectations: The First 90 Days
The goal here is to give a new hire a roadmap so they know they’re on the right track to mastering their job and creating an impact within the business. Don’t write a novel, or overcomplicate this. Keep it short and to the point.
It should be a clear and concise outline of what is expected during the first 90 days. Outline what you expect them to master and the outcomes you want them to achieve. Keep it attainable and realistic.
Now work backward from that outline.
What do you need to do or provide so that they can reach those outcomes? How deep do they need to understand the customer service process? Or the history of digital ad experiments that the company has done?
Here’s an example of one for a junior role that helped us nail partnerships at the beginning of one of my previous companies.
Accelerate Relationship Building
This is one of the easiest ways to help a new hire integrate quickly into the team. Building trust with the team takes time, but you can accelerate it with these simple tactics. Each of these is scheduled ahead of time, before their start date with us.
Schedule Lunches With Peers
Rather than being left to a new hire’s social skills, we schedule a lunch with a new peer they’ll be working with each day for the first week.
These are 1:1 lunches intended to allow them to bond on a personal level. This is another small gesture that substantially increases success for a new hire.
Schedule Daily Check-Ins With You
Because my title as CEO naturally makes people feel intimidated, it’s critical I build trust with anyone who reports to me early in the relationship.
I schedule 30 minutes each day during the first two weeks to have a casual Q&A session together.
This is their time to ask me about what they’re learning during their onboarding while getting to know me more personally.
Assign a Mentor For Navigating The Company Culture
Pair them with a mentor who can help them navigate the ins and outs of the company.
Ideally, they should be approachable and accessible, so they can ask dumb questions and get clarification on company processes without being judged.
The goal is to help them feel more at ease while they're getting to know the company culture.
Phase 2: Operational Immersion
By now, we’ve done an excellent job of building trust with our new hire by doing a few simple things ahead of time that will leave a lasting impression.
They should be well prepared for what’s expected of them, have a good understanding of who does what, and be excited about their role.
The second phase starts on their first day when a new hire is ready to dive into their role.
Weeks 1 - 2: Company Mastery
During the first two weeks, we’ll schedule various 30 to 60 min deep-dive sessions on our business.
We start always start with who our customers are, not what we sell. I find it’s easier to understand why we exist and what we do once they understand the customer.
We’ll then move into a few other topics that give a strong understanding of what we’ve built to this point, and how we work together:
Meet Our Customer
Mission & Market: Where we fit, what we're doing, and why we're doing it
Product: What we've built, how it works, who uses it.
Building a Brand: Why and how we'll do this
Speed, Cadence & Experimentation
How We Work: Communicating As A Team
Building Mini Machines: Why and how we depend on systems to run our business
Your first 90 days: What you'll achieve, learn, and be expected to run with
Weeks 3 - 4: The Power of Shadowing
Out of everything we do, shadowing is by far the most powerful piece of our onboarding machine.
By shadowing, an individual gains a strong understanding of the company's culture, dynamics, and decision-making processes before they make major decisions. Shadowing isn't just beneficial—it's transformative.
An individual gets a unique opportunity here to absorb the process ahead of time, so they can implement it effectively when it's their turn to run with it.
In my experience, the team members who have shadowed, have had an exponentially higher success rate than any of their peers who didn’t shadow.
Weeks 5 - 6: Doing & Fine-Tuning
By now the new hire has context on the business, how the team works, and has had the unique experience of shadowing. They’ll now start executing their job, with me offering feedback over the next two weeks.
This will fine-tune how they do their job. The goal is to fly solo within two weeks.
They'll get to fly but with guardrails. Guardrails give me peace of mind that they won't break anything critical.
We agree they’ll get 51% of the vote, but I can veto anything that doesn’t align with our values or business goals. With this agreement, they’re empowered to make decisions without me as long as there are no surprises.
If anything isn’t going as planned they agree to come to me as soon as possible to figure out another path.
Putting It All Together
Together, these phases create a seamless onboarding journey - from a warm welcome to a full-fledged contribution - ensuring every new hire is not just prepared for success but is making an impact within the company within six weeks.
While anyone can hire talent, retaining them is tough. An onboarding machine gives you an unfair advantage in the market simply by giving new hires a way to integrate into the business faster. You’ll retain top talent longer, attracting more talent.
Think about what it’s like to be a new employee at your company. Is it overwhelming? Or is it easy to learn about the business and acclimate? What can you do to increase a new hire’s success?
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