Hiring and Onboarding
Getting the right person in, and giving them a real first month
You don't hire often enough to be good at it
That's not a knock. It's arithmetic. If you hire twice a year, you're making one of the most consequential decisions in the business on a process you rebuild from scratch every time.
So the job posting gets written the night before it goes up. The interviews are a conversation rather than a comparison, which means you end up choosing on instinct and hoping. And when someone good says yes, there's no plan for their first month, so they spend it shadowing whoever's free and picking things up in whatever order they happen to come.
The cost of that is slow. A new hire who takes four months to get useful instead of two is expensive, and most of the gap isn't about them.
Before they start
Most of the work happens before anyone applies.
That starts with what the role actually is, which is harder than it sounds when you're hiring because you're overwhelmed rather than because you've defined a gap. What does this person own? What are they responsible for that nobody currently is? Getting that wrong is how you end up with a role that's really three roles.
Then the posting, written so the right people recognize themselves in it, and an interview process that compares candidates on the same things rather than on how well each conversation happened to go. Same questions, a clear sense of what a good answer sounds like, and some way of checking the thing the job actually requires.
The first thirty days
Onboarding is where most of the value gets lost, because it's the part nobody plans.
A good first month has a shape. What they learn in week one and what can wait. Who they meet and why. What they're expected to be able to do on their own by day thirty, and who's checking. Where the documentation lives so they're not asking a colleague every twenty minutes for things that could be written down.
It also means being explicit about the unwritten parts: how decisions get made here, how people communicate, what the norms are that everyone absorbed years ago and nobody thinks to mention. New people spend an enormous amount of energy decoding that, and you can just tell them.
What this Usually Includes
Defining the role and what it owns
Writing the job description and posting
A structured interview process and question set
Scorecards so candidates are compared on the same things
Reference and skills checking
Offer and start-date logistics
A first-thirty-days plan with clear milestones
Onboarding documentation and orientation materials
A check-in structure for the first few months
Why me
I spent three and a half years at a marketing and PR agency and finished as Director of Traffic and Operations, where I built the onboarding system we used for new hires. That came out of watching people arrive and take months to get their footing, not because they weren't capable but because nobody had decided what their first weeks should look like.
Before that I spent years in hospitality, where you're hiring constantly and the gap between a good onboarding and a bad one is visible within a week. At one point I built a banquet team from scratch: defining the roles, hiring into them, and training people from nothing into a team that could run a service.
What Comes Next
What They Need on Day One
Onboarding works when the process is already written down. If it isn't, that's the piece to do first.
Where they fit
A new role only makes sense against the existing structure. Sometimes the hiring conversation turns out to be a structure conversation.
About to hire someone?
Tell me what you're trying to fill and where you are in the process. Whether that's a posting that needs writing or someone starting in two weeks, there's usually a way to make it go better.