Summary
Onboarding new employees to your team is all too often treated as an afterthought, or best case, as an at-the-moment-thought. Employees deserve a well-thought out experience that includes them from the very beginning–from the creation of the position description—to that time after they’ve become integrated into our teams and organizations. We can trace some of these imperfect scenarios all the way back to the creation our performance profiles or position descriptions, and how they were created. When we understand the entire journey from candidate to employee we see the value of treating onboarding as an ending of a particular process instead of a solitary event in time.
Key Insights
-
•
Traditional job descriptions focus on tasks rather than measurable performance outcomes, limiting effective hiring.
-
•
Performance profiles clarify what success looks like and help teams agree on hiring criteria, leading to better candidate matches.
-
•
Structured interview guides aligned with performance profiles ensure consistent, fair, and relevant candidate assessments.
-
•
Unpaid design exercises or take-home tasks can exclude qualified candidates with caregiving or other external responsibilities.
-
•
The candidate experience after the interview and before the start date is often neglected, causing anxiety and disengagement.
-
•
Maintaining personal contact with candidates post-offer fosters comfort and commitment before they begin.
-
•
First day onboarding should be treated as a commencement event, not a paperwork marathon, reducing overwhelm.
-
•
Buddy systems provide critical social and informational support, improving new hire adjustment and retention.
-
•
Assigning safe internal projects early helps new hires gain practical familiarity without pressure.
-
•
Onboarding should be considered a multi-touch ecosystem involving ongoing feedback, communication, and adaptation.
Notable Quotes
"If you really care about success, you define it first and hire against performance, not just experience."
"Manhole cover questions belong in the past. Focus on real skills and relevant experience instead."
"Unpaid design exercises are unfair because they don’t take into account people's real-life constraints."
"Waiting and vague communication during hiring is a painful guessing game for candidates."
"The post-offer period isn’t HR’s alone; hiring teams must stay in touch and keep the candidate engaged."
"Day one is a commencement, a graduation from candidate to employee, not a paperwork slog."
"Buddy systems create leadership opportunities and a support network without changing org charts."
"Internal projects give new hires a safe place to learn how the organization functions without fear of breaking things."
"Hiring managers should facilitate hiring decisions but truly rely on the team members who work daily with the candidate."
"Onboarding isn’t a single event or process, it’s an ecosystem with many touchpoints impacting the new employee experience."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Tools are evolving fast; it's crucial to analyze which tools will remain market leaders before heavy integration."
Farid SabitovAutomatization for Large Enterprise Teams
January 8, 2024
"Service blueprint is a knowledge graph – it gives AI intent and helps AI be more useful."
Ben Reason Aline Horta Majid Iqbal Fabiano LeoniMaking the system visible: The fastest path to better decisions
November 20, 2025
"Organizing your team in a fractal structure ensures product, engineering, and design are always represented as partners."
Alfred KahnA Seat at the Table: Making Your Team a Strategic Partner
November 29, 2023
"Our content must be concise, consistent, and actionable to reduce uncertainty for users."
Alan Williams Rose DeebDesigning essential financial services for those in need
February 10, 2022
"Rules and responsibilities documents give people concrete steps they can take towards accessibility."
Laura SchaeferDesignOps: A Conduit for Inclusion
September 9, 2022
"There’s a new tech stack for software creation, all about cloud services and subscription-based business models."
Greg PetroffSoftware as Material—A Redux
June 6, 2023
"As a researcher, your brain is shouting, red alert, red alert, there’s some problem I need to find out."
Susan Simon-DanielsWar Stories LIVE! Susan Simon-Daniels
March 30, 2020
"The biggest challenge I see is scaling without losing our humanity."
Bud Caddell Kristin Skinner Alana WashingtonDesignOps Community Sensing Session
May 13, 2021
"You don’t have to sit through two hours a day; we’ll spend about 15 minutes on setup then you’ll pair up and do the exercise."
Dave GrayGroup Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps
November 7, 2017
