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
"Creating scalable design systems means solving challenges at scale with integrated knowledge and automation."
Farid SabitovTheme Four Intro
September 9, 2022
"Participants are paid based on purchasing power parity — $400 USD equivalent spread over six months for active participation."
Wyatt HaymanGlobal Research Panels
August 8, 2020
"Startups promised limitless growth but often had cultures of microaggressions, isolation, and favoritism."
Lisanne NormanWhy I Left Research
March 27, 2023
"Many of ChatGPT's organizing themes are at the same level as the basic themes, which is confusing and inappropriate."
Weidan LiQualitative synthesis with ChatGPT: Better or worse than human intelligence?
June 4, 2024
"One of the overwhelming requests has been how to make the case for design."
Ariel KennanTheme 2 Intro
December 9, 2021
"These bots will say yes to all your ideas, whether they're good or bad—that's the rocket to Mars anti-pattern."
Christian CrumlishThe Pygmalion Effect: In Which a Vibe Coding Experiment Becomes a Million Lines…
August 14, 2025
"Critiques help teams stop being the lone ranger and instead iterate faster together with purpose and clarity."
Joseph MeersmanSweating the Pixel: Scaling Quality through Critique
June 10, 2021
"AI is better seen as augmentation to make us more efficient, not automation to replace us."
Russell Blair Milan GuentherKilling the blank page
June 5, 2024
"Soft skills often are a multiplier on your hard skills—they’re just as valuable, if not more so."
Liam ThurstonWhy Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It
June 10, 2022
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can research and operations teams collaboratively evaluate new UXR tools for usability and operational fit?
What strategies can researchers use to become catalysts for change using play?
How does including metadata like methodology, market, and date improve the quality of research repository search results?