7 Essential Steps for Successfully Onboarding New Staff: How to Set Your New Hires Up for Success in 90 Days
Bringing on new talent is exciting, but without a structured onboarding process, you risk overburdening your business with costs and inefficiencies. To avoid burying your business in unsustainable overhead costs, you need to ensure that every new hire pays their way and increases profitability as soon as possible. In this article, I outline some of the key steps to ensure your new hires are integrated, competent, and productive within their first 90 days.
I’ll also highlight the unforgivable mistakes that prevent new employees from delivering value, ensuring you avoid costly missteps during onboarding.
Step 1: Fair and Repeatable Recruitment Process
Before onboarding, you need the right person. A structured, fair, and repeatable recruitment process is essential for attracting talent that fits both culturally and skill-wise. Your gut is often wrong. Have a proper process for hiring.
Key Elements:
Job Descriptions & Person Specifications: Clearly define the role and the skills/attitudes required. This ensures you target the right talent from the start. Consider potential as well as performance. Future proof your hires.
Assessing Key Skills and Cultural Fit: Use a mix of assessments, including technical skill tests, behavioural interviews, and cultural fit questionnaires. Remember, the right attitude often outperforms technical competence in the long run.
Standardised Interview Process: Create a repeatable interview framework that scores candidates consistently on key metrics like skills, experience, and cultural alignment. Don’t believe the CV - test the capability.
Common Mistake #1: Not Aligning Candidates with Core Values Hiring someone technically skilled but misaligned with your company’s values will likely create friction and reduce overall team performance. Ensure alignment early.
Step 2: Setting Clear Expectations from Day One
Every new hire should know exactly what success looks like in their role from day one. This includes understanding the mission of the business, their specific responsibilities, and how their work ties into the larger goals of the company.
Key Elements:
Role Clarity: Give the new hire a simple, clear overview of their responsibilities and immediate priorities.
Performance Measures: Outline specific KPIs or metrics they need to hit within their first 30, 60, and 90 days.
Cultural Expectations: Explain the company's culture and core values, ensuring the new hire knows how they are expected to interact with colleagues and clients.
Common Mistake #2: Ambiguity About What Success Looks Like Many employers fail to articulate what good performance looks like. Make sure you clearly define success metrics for each hire early on. New hires can go into “survival mode” and overplay their strengths and this can cause them to de-rail. Especially more senior hires. Let people know what they don’t have to do as well as what they should focus on. Don’t cause overwhelm and anxiety through lack of clarity.
Step 3: The First 30 Days: Orientation & Integration
The first 30 days are all about getting your new hire comfortable with their new environment, team, and workflows. Use this time to introduce them to the business, build relationships, and ensure they understand their role.
Key Elements:
Orientation: Don’t waste too much time on box-ticking, compliance training and bureaucratic content in the first 90 days. Focus on helping the new hire make friends, settle in and become confidence, competent and productive.
Mentorship or Buddy System: Pair the new hire with a seasoned employee who can help guide them through their first month and answer questions.
Early Wins: Assign small, manageable tasks that let them experience success early on. This boosts confidence and helps build momentum.
Common Mistake #3: Information Overload Many companies overwhelm new hires with irrelevant information in the first few days. Focus on a gradual introduction to key tasks and relationships, rather than trying to cover everything at once.
Another great idea is to have a “first impressions interview” or other process to capture their early observations and thoughts about what they see the company doing well and less well, and any ideas they have to improve or change things. We all become snow blind to these “ticks” as we become overfamiliar with the workplace and role - a new hire can give you valuable, third-party perspective. Don’t shoot the messenger!
Step 4: The 60-Day Mark: Building Competence
By the 60-day mark, your new hire should be familiar with their role and beginning to contribute meaningfully. Now is the time to deepen their competence in the tasks most critical to their success.
Key Elements:
Role-Specific Training: Provide targeted training that builds the technical skills they need to excel in their role.
Shadowing & Hands-On Experience: Let them shadow more experienced colleagues and gradually take on more responsibility in key tasks.
Regular Feedback: Schedule regular one-on-one meetings to review progress, celebrate small wins, and address any gaps or challenges. Ad hoc drop ins and check ins are good too.
Common Mistake #4: Failing to Provide Feedback Without regular feedback, new hires won’t know where they stand. Constructive feedback helps keep them on track and accelerates their learning curve.
Step 5: The 90-Day Mark: Measuring Productivity and ROI
At the end of 90 days, your new hire should be delivering real value. This is when you measure whether they are achieving their KPIs and how their productivity impacts the business’s bottom line.
Key Elements:
Evaluate KPIs: Assess whether the new hire has hit the specific metrics and goals set at the start of their onboarding. This could include sales targets, project completion, or efficiency improvements.
Measure ROI: Compare their cost to the business (salary, training, etc.) against the value they’ve generated. If they’re contributing to team goals and improving your staff/profit ratio, they’re on track.
Future Planning: Now is the time to set longer-term goals, ensuring that their growth continues beyond the 90-day onboarding phase.
Common Mistake #5: Failing to Measure ROI Without clear measures of ROI, it's difficult to gauge the success of onboarding. Ensure you have a system for measuring their contribution and impact.
Step 6: Ongoing Support and Development
Onboarding doesn’t stop at 90 days. Continuous development is crucial for long-term success. Once the foundational skills are in place, shift focus to growth opportunities.
Key Elements:
Training & Development Plans: Lay out a 6-month or 1-year development plan, incorporating further training, mentorship, and leadership opportunities.
Skill Enhancement: Provide opportunities for employees to build on their core skills, whether through formal training, conferences, or hands-on project experience.
Peer Feedback: Encourage regular feedback from colleagues to ensure ongoing personal and professional development.
Common Mistake #6: Neglecting Development After Onboarding Don’t make the mistake of thinking the work is done after 90 days. Continue to invest in your employees’ growth to retain top talent.
Step 7: Cultural Integration & Team Fit
For an employee to thrive, they need to feel connected to the team and the company culture. Continue fostering this sense of belonging through regular team-building activities and cultural immersion. Teams work much better under pressure when they’ve got to know, like and trust each other socially.
Key Elements:
Team Building: Organise events that allow new hires to bond with their colleagues outside of work tasks.
Cultural Fit Check-Ins: Assess how well the employee is aligning with company values and culture through feedback from their peers and managers.
Celebrating Success: Acknowledge contributions in team meetings, making sure their achievements are visible and celebrated.
Common Mistake #7: Failing to Foster Cultural Fit If a new hire doesn’t integrate into the company culture, their engagement and productivity will suffer. Prioritise cultural fit as much as technical skills. And watch out for current employees playing politics or undermining your new hires.
Conclusion: Avoiding the 7 Unforgivable Mistakes in Onboarding
Onboarding is more than just an administrative process; it’s a critical time to ensure new hires are fully equipped to succeed. By following these 7 essential steps, business owners can create an onboarding process that drives quick integration and ROI, while avoiding common mistakes that hold new employees back.
Every new hire you buy knocks your margin back so you need to turn that cost into benefit as quickly as you can. It won’t happen on it’s own, you need a proper process and the right management attention to get and keep employees productive and performing.
If you’re looking to improve the productivity and capability of your team and develop a better system for onboarding and training your staff, give me a call and see how we can help you develop a world-class team in your business.
