The Effective Hiring Manager

25Onboarding New Hires

Well done! You’ve set a high bar, you’ve prepared, screened, and interviewed; someone has met your standard, and you’ve made an offer. We hope your offer is accepted. This part of the process feels different doesn’t it? After all that work, it’s uncomfortable, and maybe even frustrating, that we’re no longer in control of our fate.

That feeling is a sign that you’ve started the Manager Tools Onboarding Process.

It might surprise you that we’re talking about onboarding already. Most organizations think of onboarding as what happens once a new hire starts work. It’s about administration, HR, and security.

But that approach is strategically flawed (in addition to being inefficient and ineffective). Here’s why. If you think of hiring the way most organizations do it, there’s the process of interviewing, and then, if someone accepts, there’s onboarding once they arrive. There are two quite different phases, separated by the time between offer and start date.

This approach is the way it is because those are the times when the organization is in control of what’s happening. The entire time between offer and start date is left out of most hiring guidance and onboarding, because the company isn’t in control from offering to start date.

But there’s a far better way to think about, and do, onboarding.

Looking at it conceptually, hiring someone is really just about organizational continuity. The organization needs work to be done to support its mission of serving ...