Exactly How To Onboard New Hires | Ep 235
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- What is up? Welcome back to Build. And today I wanna talk about something super tactical for those business owners in my audience, which is how to onboard new hires.

So the reason I want to talk about this is I have gotten so many questions recently and one stood out to me and in particular, and it was a question with a gentleman who came to one of my workshops and he was asking me what to do about this person who, you know, they're three months in and he's like, they're just definitely not a good fit. And when he described everything, I...

Because I answer so many of these questions, as he's describing what this person's doing, he's saying, oh my gosh, they're not doing this right. They're not doing this. They're acting like this. They're talking to people like this. And what I asked him is I said, okay, heard, like, obviously those things are not what you want. But I guess my question for you is, you know, did you tell this person what you expected of them? Did you let them know when you saw them do this thing that was against your culture, that it was against your culture? Did you give them feedback? And the answer was no.

And it really got me thinking about a topic that I hadn't talked about in a while, but it's just so important to literally anything that you're doing in business, which is onboarding new hires. I know it sounds dry and it sounds boring, but like, I think one of the best decisions I ever made was to put an exorbitant amount of effort on onboarding more than a lot of other companies do. And the reason specifically that I want to do this is it's somewhere like 20 to 40% of new hires actually quit or are terminated in the first 100 days.

And so what that means is if you're not actively creating the onboarding experience, then you're essentially, there's an experience, it's just not the one that you wanted, right? And essentially you're burning all the money and all the time that you spent trying to find that person into the trash. Because a lot of people, what they do is they spend all this time to find people

And then they're like, oh, thank God this person's in. And then the moment that person gets in, they're like, good luck. See you later, right? Like, I'm done. I'm exhausted. I found you. Here you are. Please take over. Do these things. I'm done, right? And the reality is, is that just like you're evaluating that person while they're in your company, they're also evaluating you. And that's the thing is like first impressions matter. I don't care what anybody says. First impressions matter. People make snap judgment within seconds.

And after they've made those judgments, it's really hard to change their mind. If they have a terrible first day, it's disorganized, you're not involved, it's all over the place, they feel ignored. If they don't know what success looks like, then you've probably already lost that person because they're like, what the hell? This place doesn't even have their shit together. Not to mention...

Something else, okay? Just because someone accepted the job does not mean they stopped looking. Okay, a lot of people think, they're like, they took the job, I'm in the clear, we're amazing, great.

Here's the thing. People will take the right now job when they need work, but they're still evaluating if this is the right job for them. And that doesn't mean that they stopped interviewing. A lot of people don't stop interviewing after they accept a job. It's just that they think this is the best I've got so far. It's not my perfect fit. I'm just going to keep looking when we take this job, just in case. There's a lot of things to take into consideration when we're bringing people on

And I don't want you guys to waste your time. I don't want you to waste your money. And I don't want you to fall into the traps that a lot of companies do, which is you put all this effort into finding a person. It takes forever. And then you just lose them immediately. And so that kind of brings me to my first point, which is like, why is it that new hires quit? Why is it that so many people end up opting out in the first 90 days? Most of the time, it's because expectations and reality don't match. Tony Robbins talks about this, which is if reality exceeds expectations, people are happy.

If expectations exceed reality, people are not happy. So most of the time when someone comes in and they're not happy with the job, it is not because the job is shitty. It's not because the job is bad. It might not even be because you have done a poor job at anything and onboarding them, but it could just be that the expectations and reality don't match.

Okay, they thought the job was one thing. It's not. They thought the culture was one way. It's not. You oversold the benefits, but you didn't prepare them for the challenges, right? And then you basically throw them in with no training and poorly set expectations, and then they fail. This all comes back to essentially this cognitive dissonance, which is when someone's expectations and reality don't align, they just feel uncomfortable, right? Their brain is like, what the hell? This wasn't what you signed up for. This wasn't what you wanted. And it's telling them to leave.

And so what happens is if you don't give them that clarity and that confidence early, starting before they even take the job, they're just gonna start looking for another job before they even get done with their first month.

And so all that to say, that is the main reason I see why new hires quit, which is like you oversell them. You are not upfront about the challenges that are involved. And then you don't set them up for success by telling them what to expect. It's funny because when I was first hiring, and this was when we had less than 10 people in my first business, this was almost a decade ago. I know, I'm showing my age. When I was hiring, I remember I was like, wow, I have no idea what to expect.

what this person is supposed to do, how to train this person, all this stuff. And so I was like, you know what? Fuck it. I'm just going to be honest. And so I'd be on interviews and I'd be like, listen, I'm going to be real with you. I'm going to level with you on this one. Obviously you can see I'm young. I'm fucking 23. I don't know how to do your job. I want to be upfront right now, which is I can't train you how to do your job. I need you to come in and just be able to train yourself and be able to use outside resources if you need additional help. I'm here to provide clarity and context on the company, but I'm not here to train you.

but I want to be really upfront. Like you're not going to have me mentoring you on, you know, how to run an IT department, how to run a finance department, how to run a people ops department. Like at the time, I didn't know how to do any of those things. And it's funny, but that little sentence of being like, I have no idea how to do your job and I cannot help you.

It saved me because people came in and they were like, oh no, you're right. You don't know how to do this. And I was like, I told you, you tell me what to do. Like, I have no idea. I haven't done this before, right? I knew enough to know how to hire the person, but I didn't really know that much. That alone, like I think a lot of people who listen to my podcast are probably, you know,

you know, you're in your first business, you have a feeling like you have something to prove, you want people to think that you're competent. Like, I understand all of that, but I've just never found a benefit in overplaying how good I am, how good my company is, how much we have our shit together. Like, I always, if anything, try to underplay it. And I try to make things sound worse than they are because I would rather have them come in and be like, oh shit, it's not as bad as she said it was going to be.

Because I've learned that the opposite is why people leave. Let's talk about how we actually fix this, okay? Preventing churn in new hires actually starts before their first day. So a lot of people think, oh my gosh, on their first day, this big impression, like it's already started. It started in the communications that you had right after you offered them the job.

Okay. And this is where most companies drop the ball because they think that onboarding starts on the first day, but it actually starts the moment after they accept the offer. It's really similar to sales, which is like if you sell a customer and then they don't hear from you at all for weeks or months or whatever, until something is to happen with the product or there, you want to upsell them or renew. They're like, fuck you. Like, I don't give a shit. You forgot about me. You, you got the sale, you closed the credit card and then you were like, peace out. That's

the same way new hires feel if we don't engage them quickly, right? And so right after someone joins my company, there's a few things that are going to happen, okay? If they're remote, I'm going to send them a welcome package immediately, as well as somebody in the company is going to go out of their way to either send them a handwritten note or company swag. We want to immediately reinforce the decision to join the team.

Right. Now, the second thing that goes with that is I want to give them, I want to call it pre-work, like pre-reading. I want them to have something that they can get their hands in. They can start digging in before they even show up. A lot of people are really excited once they've accepted a new job. They want to spend their time learning. And I think a lot of people are like, oh gosh, they have their last job. They're wrapping up. Yes. But here's the thing I've noticed. The best people, the people who are the best fits for the company, they want to start learning stuff before they even start.

Because they're so excited. It's like all they can think about. And so they really just want to dig in to everything that you have to offer. And so have pre-onboarding materials ready that you can send to that person. And then the last piece to it, right, before they even show up, before their first day, is don't make them wait for an email login or a desk.

by their first day, have them already have an email by the time they've walked in. They've been already, you can send the onboarding things to that email. So they already feel like they're part of the team. And the moment that they show up, if you have an in-person office, you have a desk ready for them. It's got their favorite snacks. It's got their computer. It's got their work phone. Like my favorite thing to do is find out what's going on.

What are somebody's favorite snacks? Do they have like a preference in terms of like sitting, standing? What is it? And then like, let's have all of that ready for them when they walk into the office, right? And so it feels like they are welcomed. They have a surprise. We've thought about them. It's just reinforcing the decision that they're in the right spot. That's all the stuff that you want to do before the first day. Now, when it comes to the first day, that's when we want to set the tone.

Here's the thing. A lot of people think, oh my gosh, great, first day, HR, I need you to welcome them and bring them in and make them feel amazing. Honestly, fuck that, okay? HR is part of the process. They are not the whole process, guys. If somebody is directly reporting to you, you fucking better not just say, hey, HR, take care of onboarding them. Like, that is not their job, okay? It's your job.

To set expectations clearly, to give them what success looks like, and to talk about what winning in the role means. For you to introduce them to key people, to get them into belonging quickly, to give them the lowdowns on how people operate and what teams do what and how things go. Because here's the thing, people don't leave jobs, they leave bosses. And if they feel like they've walked into an environment where they don't have support from their boss, they're going to feel pretty shitty. Now,

Now, obviously, I will be transparent with you. That's going to look different depending on who they report to. You know, if you're the CEO, as I am, I don't have the time to spend three or four days in a row with somebody. It's just my schedule is booked out for months. It's just not happening, right? But that doesn't mean they can't sit in with me. That doesn't mean they can't shadow me. That doesn't mean I can't do dinner. I can't do lunch. I can't see them between things. I'm going to do as much as possible to give them my time that it allows.

Now, I would say this, the lower in the organization somebody is, the more structured you want to give them onboarding. If you have to give someone an insanely structured onboarding and they are coming in at like a C level, then that's kind of concerning to me because you want somebody that also has first principle thinking ability and can ask for things and also contribute to their own onboarding.

Now, I typically do set them up to still be structured because I want them to know what I want to have happen. But I also like keep it fluid and touch base with those people on a day-to-day basis and asking them like, how's this going? Is it too slow? Is it too fast? Like, what do you want to do? Do you want to take the reins and just run with this shit that you know you need to do? Main takeaways of the first day are in the first day,

Don't just delegate it to HR. Don't delegate to somebody else. Like make a good first impression. Think about it like if you had just, you know, brought on a brand new customer and it's their first interaction with your company. Like what do you want that day to feel like? What do you want them to walk away thinking and feeling? And that's why this is so important.

Now you have the first day. Now what's going to enable somebody to be successful in all the days and weeks thereafter is getting the 30, 60, 90 day framework down.

Okay, I talk about this a lot. It's something that we do in our company and I find it to be incredibly useful and I don't understand why people don't do it because it doesn't take that much. Like it'll take time, but like Jesus, I mean, we have Chad CPT nowadays. We've got my podcast. We have so many things. Okay, if you don't have a structure of 30, 60, 90, you are setting them up to fail, period. Okay, and there's no excuses anymore. This shit take you 45 minutes.

So how do you break down a 30-60-90? Really, it's just setting expectations for what you need that person to accomplish when they've walked into the company.

So let's look at what we kind of want to break down in the 30, 60, 90 days. Okay. So the first 30 days, that's just really learning, immersion, and quick wins. Okay. Why is this important? One, they need to know exactly what they're doing and what good looks like because they were at another company and maybe it was a board game, right? Maybe you're both board games, right? Your companies. But over

But over there is checkers, over here it's chess. And so there's different rules of the game. They need to know what good looks like in this company. How you run marketing in that company doesn't look the same as how you run marketing in this company. So though they have the experience of being a director of marketing, for example, they don't have one being a director of marketing for you. And so they need to understand what you want out of marketing, what your expectations are. And so what do you want them to learn in the first 30 days? That's the first piece. The second piece is give them small wins fast.

Okay, if they don't feel competent and useful, they get discouraged quickly and disengage. Not to mention...

Here's the other piece of those small wins. That is going to edify them to the rest of the team. If you can point to these small wins that they contribute to when they first come in, that is what's going to earn them the respect of the rest of your team here. Because everyone's always looking at the new hire saying, what's this guy know? What's this guy gonna do? Like, what's he got to add here? Like, who's this person coming in? Think they can do all these things. We're doing all this shit over, right?

And so if you give them quick wins that can be visible for the team, that's like the best thing you could do. Because here's the thing, you don't want to just like have someone come in and start changing everything immediately within their role because that's the worst thing you could do because they don't have full context. They don't know what you guys have tried. They don't know everything that's going on yet. And so I often tell people like not to do too much, but I do give them quick wins so that

I feel like they can gain respect of the team. Now, the second piece is days 30 to 60, which is, I would say, like real world execution. This is when you've got to give them ownership. You need to get them dialed in.

Okay, so what we want to do is we want to keep them engaged by assigning them harder and harder tasks and challenges. I will say this, in 30 days to 60 days, this person should be taking one-on-ones if they're a leader. They should be leading meetings if they're a leader. If they're an individual contributor, they should be owning pieces of the clientele base or project. If they're in sales, they should be taking sales. Like they should be absolutely up and running in these days. Now, are they as productive as everybody else on your team? Like probably not because...

At that point, they still don't have all the context, but I will tell you this, as an aside. The best people I hire are always productive after 30 days. In fact, some of the best people I hire are productive within two or three weeks. And so I do want that to sink in because smart people find ways to be useful much faster than

People who aren't smart. And so that is why that's something I look for in people I bring onto my team. But I encourage you to also look for those things. And now that brings me to days 60 to 90. Okay. That is when you want full ownership and accountability. Now, here's the thing. Somebody in 90 days, they should be producing results. If they're really confused and they're really struggling, at this point, you need to evaluate if they're really a fit.

Because some people just aren't the right fit. And you have to know that by day 90. Now, here's the thing. I most of the time can tell by day 90.

probably the first few days. Because it's like, if somebody's not getting a hang of things, if I'm not hearing good stuff from my team about them, if people aren't saying, oh, I love this person, oh, this, oh, that, then I'm like, oh, I'm a little worried. Because pretty much every strong player on my team, when they first came in, made a really good impression. And people had things to say. They're like, hey, they contributed. They offered me to help. They offered to help me here. They did this. They did that. If somebody comes in, I don't hear a peep.

I'm like, fuck, I don't know if this person's got it, right? But by day 90, they definitely need to have things going. They definitely need, like if they're stepping in, taking over a leadership position, they need to be fully running that department. If they're taking it as an individual contributor, they need to be fully up and going. Now, you can't compare them to somebody who's been there for two years, to be fair. Like 90 days, there's still gonna be stuff they mess up. They're still gonna make, you know, not gonna have the perfect judgment calls because they don't have all the past experiences everybody else has.

Okay, but they should be trying and they should be trying and failing and you should be giving feedback constantly. And that's kind of the piece that's, I would say like the through line through all of this, which is like the only way that this is effective is if you're constantly giving them feedback in the beginning.

It's kind of like when you're in a new relationship, like if you're like dating, right? You have to be telling someone a lot of things in the beginning because you're just trying to show them, like you're training them how to treat you. You're training them how to treat the relationship. The same goes here. You need to train them how to treat you as boss. You need to train them how to treat the company. You need to train them how to treat their peers, right?

And so the easiest way to train somebody is just give them constant real-time feedback. That is like the best way to train somebody. Like it's not by doing anything except for giving them feedback in real time. Now, if you're giving people feedback constantly, if they have a 30, 60, 90, and you're like, I just don't think this person is the right fit. That brings me to my next point, which is positive churn. Why is it that some people should quit and it's good that some people leave?

Okay, not all turnover is bad. Some people should leave and some people you definitely want to have leave. Here's the thing though. A lot of business owners, they hold on to bad hires too long because they feel bad about letting them go.

I just want to just call it what it is. That is sunk cost fallacy. Okay, keeping the wrong person longer won't make them the right person. It just wastes more of your time and theirs. Because here's the thing, they're the right person for a different job, a different organization, a different boss. They're just not the right person for you.

And I know it's like, oh my God, but I waste all this time. Like, honestly, just fucking suck it up. I tell this for like myself too. I'm like, just shut up and just go find somebody else because you know it's not a fit. Okay. Like we can whine, we can complain, but like that's not going to do anything. Let's just get to fucking work. Let's find somebody else and let's not have to worry about this again. Here's what you want to do. Okay. If somebody is consistently underperforming, you need to ask yourself this. They either need better training or they're not the right fit.

How would you think through this? Okay. You have to audit, did I do everything to set them up for success? Right? Did I do everything? And they're still not performing. And then this next question you have to ask yourself is, did I do everything? And what I realized is that this person actually just doesn't have the skills I thought they did. Those are like the two most common things I see, which is you do everything to set someone up for success.

And they're just not getting it, right? They're not getting whatever needs to be gotten through the training. And on the other side, it's like you do everything to set them up for success. And you realize that they just actually, the skills that were expressed, the skills that you thought came with their experience just aren't the right skills. It's just not a match. And so it's just not a fit. And then the last piece is that you see that they're just not that engaged, right? And I think that's really the third door. And if somebody's not engaged and they don't care, like,

that's in the case where I'm like, get rid of those people faster, right? Now, here's the thing. Getting rid of people who aren't a culture fit, getting rid of people who can't do the job with competence, getting rid of people who don't give a shit about the job, that's positive churn. And positive churn means you get rid of the wrong people faster so that you can get the right ones in faster, okay? The faster you get the wrong people out, the faster you can get the right people in. I just, I don't know how many times I'm gonna say that, but like the faster you get the wrong people out, the faster you get the right people in.

It just like, everyone's always so scared and I get it because you don't want to look like a monster. Like trust me, I

never like firing people. I don't like letting people go. I don't like having churn. But you know what I don't like more is a bad fucking culture. I will not let people stay who shouldn't be here. Maybe that means that sometimes I have to do a search in the background to find somebody. Maybe that means that sometimes I need to have somebody else jump in and take care of things. Like I will figure something out. But as soon as I identify that somebody's not a fit, I'm like, all right, I got to get somebody who is.

Because it is just a pain point for not just you as their boss, but everybody else has to interact with them. Because like you think it's bad for you, right? Because you're their boss. But like think about everybody has to interact with them the same, if not more than you on a daily basis. It's just ruining their morale. And so speaking of morale, that brings me to my last point, which is how do you keep new hires engaged in the long term?

If I had one word to summarize how to keep people engaged and how to keep people excited about their job, the word is progress. People feel happiest when they're making progress at work.

Okay, Harvard actually calls this the progress principle. It's what makes people want to stay and perform because they're addicted to the progress. And I think addicted could be a strong word, but I'm certainly addicted to it. Works for me on my own company, right? And so the way that you do this by continuing to provide them with opportunities to make progress, continuing to show them that progress using scoreboards, feedbacks, one-on-ones, end-of-week reports, bonuses, small wins, that's it.

If you can do that after somebody comes in, you can show them progress. You can continue to give them small iterations and small challenges. Like that is what's most needed to keep people engaged. If you think about it for yourself, right? Like when do you feel like most excited about your business? When do you feel most excited about anything you're doing? It's usually when you're making progress. Like you don't feel excited going to the gym when you're not making progress. You don't feel excited about diet when you're not losing weight. You don't feel excited about relationship when it's stale.

And so the same goes for work. So if you want to keep people engaged, you need to gamify ways to make progress. So to wrap this up, for those of you who are highly tactical, and I hope you apply this, one, first impressions shape retention. Okay, what you do before they even step into their first day is going to dictate how long they're going to stay. The first 90 days will determine success or failure for this person. Onboarding is going to start before the first day.

churn is not always a bad thing, right? Because we want to get rid of the wrong people fast so we can get the right people faster and employees stay when they feel progress, okay? So if you're losing people early, I will tell you this, it is often not a hiring problem. It is an onboarding problem. Now there are many times when it is a hiring problem, but more often than not, when you're a newer business owner, when you're a newer leader, when you don't have a dialed in process, it's an onboarding problem.

So what I would ask you to reflect on is just ask yourself, am I doing everything possible to set the right expectations, to set this person up for success and to make sure that when someone steps into my company, they step into something where they can succeed.