3 Steps to Onboard a Hire More Efficiently

Hiring and onboarding new talent can be a process, and for many small business owners the first 90 days after a hire are the most crucial to the new hire’s success or failure. So today I wanted to share with you three steps that I encourage all our business coaching clients to do with each and every new hire they bring onto their team.

Step 1: Have a Good System Set Up Prior to Hiring

For the vast majority of the positions you hire for, you are likely backfilling a position that someone was already in. Which means that the majority of your work should already be done for you if you have taken the time to set up processes and procedures along the way. Let’s say for instance that you are hiring a new administrative assistant. Ideally, you would have the person that was in that position prior write down, record or otherwise document all the day-to-day activities they do for their position. This list could include things like how you like your mail handled and sorted, meeting invites and reminders, how to handle certain vendors, details on how to plan and schedule business trips, etc. Whatever you need for that position should be well documented ahead of time. I do this by asking everyone on my team to keep a running systems and processes document that covers all of their repetitive tasks. That way, when they go on vacation or if they need to take time off for whatever reason, someone is able to come in and take over their tasks with ease.

If you don’t already have this in place, this should be one of the first things you ask when someone puts in their two weeks’ notice. Because the more knowledge that you are able to get down on paper prior to hiring someone, the easier the onboarding process will be.

Step 2: Record Your Onboarding Sessions

Once you have someone new in the position and you start planning out your onboarding sessions, don’t forget to record each and every session that you have together. Not only will this help you build up a more robust systems and processes file for later use, but it will give a new hire something to to refer back to at a later date if they missed a piece of information.

Step 3: Document the Process Along the Way

And the last step in a successful onboarding process has to do with even more documentation. Let’s say that you hire your new assistant and give them the documents and videos that were put together by the last assistant. That’s a good start, but as they train, they will inevitably have questions and find inconsistencies in what is written and what should actually happen. This is a great thing. Have them update the documents in real time to reflect those changes. Because over time, this will help you create an even more robust training system.