Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Onboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought
Gold
Tuesday, November 7, 2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Share the love for this talk
Onboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought
Speakers: Russ Unger
Link:

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."

Ask the Rosenbot
Megan Blocker
A Selectively Scrappy Approach to ResearchOps
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Sean Baker
Weaving Knowledge Management into the Fabric of Our Design Practice
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Craig Villamor
Resilient Enterprise Design
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Dave Hora
Research in the Face of Complexity: New Sensibility for New Situations
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Gordon Ross
12 Months of COVID-19 Design and Digital Response with the British Columbia Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Brenna Fallon
Learning Over Outcomes
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Daniel Orbach
Zero to One: Co-Creating Operating Models with your Team
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Scher Foord
Turn the Ship Around: How to Apply Design Thinking Across Your Organization
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Alison Rand
Scaling Impact with Service Design
2021 • DesignOps Community
Indi Young
Paying Better Attention to the Problem with Indi Young
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Amber Knabl
Empowering innovation: The critical role of inclusive product development in the AI era
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Mark Templeton
Creating a Legacy: the ultimate experience
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Sheryl Cababa
Expanding Your Design Lens with Systems Thinking
2023 • Enterprise Community
Christian Crumlish
Introduction by our Conference Chair
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Abbey Smalley
Scaling UX Past the Size of Your Team
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Cheryl Platz
Merging Improv with Design
2019 • Enterprise Community

More Videos

Kit Unger

"Designers focus on shipping and don’t have bandwidth for documenting learnings or synthesizing knowledge across products."

Kit Unger Jackie Ho Veevi Rosenstein Vasileios Xanthopoulos

Theme 2: Discussion

January 8, 2024

Mariesa Lenz

"Adaptability isn’t weakness, it’s strength."

Mariesa Lenz

What Beekeeping Taught me about Product Teams

October 29, 2025

Jesse Zolna

"Having a huge appetite for research and a huge manner for research is a good problem to have. So let's lean into it."

Jesse Zolna

Inviting the Whole Org to Come See For Yourself

March 30, 2020

Catt Small

"You don’t have to become a manager or director to advance; becoming a principal IC role is equally influential."

Catt Small Micah Bennett Brian Carr Jessica Harllee

What's Next for ICs: Exploring Staff and Principal Designer Roles

February 22, 2024

Louis Rosenfeld

"We haven’t put any client data into generative AI — just information about our own organization and processes."

Louis Rosenfeld Billy Carlson Jon Fukuda Maria Taylor

How AI will Change DesignOps Tooling

October 3, 2023

Sheryl Cababa

"Optimizing something for ease of use does not mean it’s best for humanity — infinite scroll is a cautionary example."

Sheryl Cababa

Expanding your Design Lens with Systems Thinking

March 28, 2023

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"We use storytelling to turn accessibility from just compliance into a business differentiator that executives care about."

Saara Kamppari-Miller Nicole Bergstrom Shashi Jain

Key Metrics: Comparing Three Letter Acronym Metrics That Include the Word “Key”

November 13, 2024

John Devanney

"Design systems help address integration challenges and differing cadences between design and development."

John Devanney

The Design Management Office

November 6, 2017

Erika Flowers

"Mural democratizes collaboration by letting people contribute regardless of seniority or location."

Erika Flowers

Introduction to MURAL for UX

June 11, 2021