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
"A tabletop exercise is like we’re all on the same team building a plan, but a war game is competition against other teams."
Terry BuckmanWargaming (An Introduction)
August 10, 2023
"We as a society are taught to care about people, rarely taught to care about ourselves."
Zariah CameronReDesigning Wellbeing for Equitable Care in the Workplace
September 23, 2024
"Mobile screen readers can confirm basic accessibility but desktop testing is still needed due to differences across tools."
Sam ProulxMobile Accessibility and You
June 9, 2022
"We were asking for users to give us their time, but we weren’t showing them that we recognized that their time had value."
Veevi RosensteinBuilding for Scale: Creating the Zendesk UX Research Practice
January 8, 2024
"Service experiences are only as inclusive as their weakest checkpoint."
Gabriela BarnevaOperationalizing Inclusive Design in Service Design
November 20, 2025
"We made this move in January 2020 — our research and insights team moved out of UX but stayed within product organizations."
Nalini KotamrajuResearch After UX
March 25, 2024
"This header took six minutes of IA work—but two years to make happen."
Sarah BarrettThe "How" of Enterprise Information Architecture
June 6, 2023
"When the world is silent, even one voice makes a difference."
Robin Beers Nalini Kotamraju Andy WarrPanel: Excellence in Communicating Insights
March 26, 2024
"The needs of a government of the people should be the needs of the people."
Victor UdoewaRadical Participatory Design: Decolonizing Participatory Design Processes
December 10, 2021
