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 society. Conceptually, then, filling that need for work is all part of the larger process of continuity: from work not getting done to that work getting done again.

What most of us think of as the hiring process (mostly interviewing) is really itself just part of the organization’s continuity process.

What most of us do now is think about interviewing and onboarding because that’s within our control. But the more strategic and professional approach is to see all of it as part of organizational continuity. If we’re part of a continuity process, everything we do is to minimize the amount of time when work’s not getting done.

That means taking responsibility even when we’re not in control: after we offer, and after they accept, right up until the start date. The best way to do that is to lay to rest the idea that onboarding is about admin.

Onboarding is the part of the organizational continuity process where, after we find the right person, we minimize the time before he or she is fully effective. With a continuity mentality, there are only two phases in our efforts: finding the person and making the person effective.

With the continuity mindset, when we make an offer, it’s not time for us to “stop working” and “start waiting.” That feeling reminds us that now our job changes from finding the person to maximizing his or her effectiveness.

That’s onboarding. Here’s what to do.

The Phases of Onboarding

It’s one process, but there are different emphases as the offeree/new hire/employee moves through it. Onboarding may last nine months or only three months. Regardless of the length, there are always five phases: close, welcome, prepare, admin, ramp.

Because onboarding is much more organization-specific than interviewing, we can’t make precise recommendations that will work for 90% of the managers 90% of the time. Most managers though, come up with a quite serviceable list of tasks from their own memory along with some emails asking for input from peers, HR, IT, Security, Finance, Accounting, and others.

After we cover some guiding principles, we’ve also included a sample of the Manager Tools Onboarding Checklist, available to our licensees. Even if you’re not a licensee, the sample image will give you a basic template for how to construct your own unique checklist.

Discipline Makes Learning Possible

This tenet of management isn’t limited to onboarding, but it’s especially true of it. Because onboarding can be episodic (this is one of the reasons so many of us don’t have processes or checklists) and yet important at the time, it falls again victim to Horstman’s Christmas Rule.

If we don’t have a process, we’re making it up as we go. That means performance is mixed, outcomes are harder to predict, and causes of success and failure are harder to isolate.

But the discipline of a known, communicated, and followed process—even a first-time, incomplete, known-to-be-missing-something one—helps us learn. We know what we did. Even if we inadvertently skip a step, at least we know we didn’t do it.

So we’re going to write it down. We’re going to publish it internally. Nothing wrong with sharing it with candidates, so they can help us. And because it’s an important, persistent process, we’re going to hotwash it every time we finish following it. (If you don’t know how to do a hotwash, also called an After Action Review or AAR, There’s a Cast for That™.)

Switch from Weaknesses to Strengths

A simple but important concept in Onboarding is that once you’ve made an offer, you’re no longer looking for weaknesses.

Think about the purpose of interviewing: to find a reason to say no. If you can’t find a reason to say no, take a step back and look for reasons to say yes. If you do say yes, the ayes have it, and the nays lose the vote.

Part of the value of saying no in interviews is to “build a high wall” around your organization. Every new hire must be as good as or better than your organization. Otherwise, you’re hurting the organization. But it also sends a message to those inside the wall that high standards are being applied to their potential future colleagues. This shows respect. What’s more, new hires who make it over the high wall are more likely to be trusted and respected earlier by their new colleagues.

Sure, as a manager you’re always evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your team. You’ll notice errors and add them to your evaluation of a new employee. But that won’t be your focus. If it is your focus, if you continue to focus on weaknesses or problems, you’ll communicate that to others. That will hamper your new employee’s ramp speed and damage his early relationship efforts.

Once someone has accepted, she’s over the wall. She’s on the team. Maybe she’s new, but she’s no longer a candidate. Maybe she hasn’t started, but she’s on the team. And hey—be careful about referring to the new hire as, “the new guy or gal.” It will last a lot longer than it will be useful. All you’re doing is creating a pseudo-probationary period. How does that help build trust?

Communicate and Report

One of the benefits of a documented process is greater ease in communicating status and reporting progress. Also, because of the effect of the Christmas Rule (see the Introduction to this book), sometimes a documented process helps team members remember what they’re supposed to be doing.

Perhaps most of all, you as the manager are responsible for all of what’s going on, but you can’t possibly be trying to do it all yourself. If others are involved in the onboarding (which of course they are), you ought not have to ask them continually whether they’ve done what they’re supposed to do. A smart spreadsheet (or Smartsheet) or whatever project tracking software you use (not so full-featured as to be off-putting to rare users) should work. And it wouldn’t be out of the question to have the new hire update the reporting system on a daily basis.

All this allows each onboarding experience to be tracked. And that is exciting, because now we have data about how the process worked.

And that means we can do a professional hotwash in no more than 15 minutes. If we’re clever, we make decisions on the spot, and we have someone editing the process live during the meeting on a TV/big screen so all can contribute. (Maybe on your first run-through.)

Onboarding is the hiring manager’s responsibility. It’s not complex. It just requires discipline and some basic tracking and reporting. It’s not enough to get someone to say yes to your offer. You’ve got to help the person to be effective. That’s the whole point of an effective hiring process.

The Manager Tools Onboarding Checklist

For our Licensees at Manager Tools, we created a customizable spreadsheet that lists over 250 editable tasks that cover the gamut of onboarding responsibilities. All you have to do is enter your offeree’s name and, as you have them, their acceptance and start dates. It lists in chronological order all the tasks you might conceivably need to onboard someone in virtually any situation.

Once you have the list, you can easily go through it and delete tasks that don’t apply to your situation and add tasks with their own deadlines. Every task has a due date associated with the timeline. If a task is not yet due, that cell shows white, with the due date. If the task is due in the next few days, the cell shows orange. When you type done in the field, the cell turns green. And if the task is overdue (the date is in the past) that task’s status cell shows red. The moment you open the document you can tell the status of all the tasks.

As an example, Figure 25.1 shows the Spring 2019 hiring of Sandy Churchill.

Even if you create your own spreadsheet/task list from scratch, you’re far better off keeping track of all the myriad tasks yourself than either turning them over to others or wondering every day what still needs to be done.

Hiring isn’t just interviewing. Effective hiring means helping your new team member achieve high effectiveness as fast as possible. Planned and measured onboarding is indispensable to that goal.