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
"An effective design organization treats operations as seriously as the work products."
Kristin SkinnerOpening Keynote: Org Design for Design Orgs
November 6, 2017
"We encourage you all to be your own heroes and connect your own documents."
Jon Fukuda Ellie KryslDesign Planning and Management Support
October 3, 2023
"I generated a Tailwind color palette with AI that took seconds, compared to what used to take me some time manually."
John DonmoyerShipping your code generation experiments to production
June 11, 2025
"The workplaces conditions and expectations to perform faster forever are biologically impossible to sustain."
Alla WeinbergHealing Toxic Stress
September 23, 2024
"Each conference theme acts like a mini conference exploring a deep aspect of designing at scale."
Uday GajendarTheme 1: Introduction
June 9, 2021
"If we can’t provide research as a service at scale, we need to make sure the teams are equipped to do it on their own."
Erin May Roberta Dombrowski Laura Oxenfeld Brooke HintonDistributed, Democratized, Decentralized: Finding a Research Model to Support Your Org
March 10, 2022
"It’s really helpful to ask for meeting agendas in advance to attend only ceremonies where UX dependencies exist."
Chris HodowanecAgile + User Experience: How to navigate the Agile landscape as an UX Practitioner
November 16, 2022
"We try to build bridges between design ops, product ops, TPMs, and engineering for a holistic program management approach."
Maggie DieringerCutting through the Noise
September 24, 2020
"Overlap between design leadership and ops is context based; pragmatic collaboration gets things moving faster."
Tim ParmeeChanging Our Design Pressure Points
October 2, 2023
