How to Make New Hire Onboarding Not Suck

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,420 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 8 minutes to read.

Are you hiring right now?

If so, you have mere seconds to convince a candidate to apply to your job. In today’s age of information overload, candidates vet job posts primarily based on the listed salary.

Undershoot compensation, even by a couple thousand bucks, and you lose your shot at great hires.

But how do you determine market compensation?

Glassdoor is all over the place. Twitter says new seniors should make $120k. Available comp information is largely unreliable and biased.

That’s why our firm uses Big 4 Transparency.

It’s a compensation data set developed by crowdsourcing nearly 14,000 salary entries from real accountants working real jobs. They provide a dashboard with initial salary analytics and update it quarterly.

I can confidently say this tool helps us stay ahead of the competition by paying top of market and retaining staff.

If you want a demo, schedule here.

(I do not own a stake in B4 Transparency nor am I compensated for this ad. I genuinely believe it is an amazing tool and wanted to share it with you).

It today’s post I’m going to give you a handful of tips you can implement immediately to improve your onboarding process with new hires.

You can have the best hiring process in the world.

But if your onboarding sucks, it won’t matter because you’ll suffer high turnover or underperformance. Both of which are costly.

When you implement a strong onboarding process, new hires have clarity, they reach their full potential quickly, and your in-place team enjoys the process rather than looking at it as an annoying task to check off.

Unfortunately, many firms think “onboarding” means one week of training which ultimately leads to disaster.

Great Onboarding Takes THREE Months

Don’t believe me?

Look at your most recent hires. How long did it take them to get up to full production?

Three months? Six? Eight?

A Gallup report says it can take twelve months for a new hire to be at full production.

Bad onboarding is costing you money in terms of lost production, so it makes sense that this needs to be an area of focus for your firm.

Though I can’t explain every step of our onboarding in a short post, here are a handful of things we do at our firm that have helped streamline our onboarding:

Step 1: Give Clarity Before Day 1

Starting a new job is scary and nerve wracking.

Provide clarity to new hires before they start on their first day. Give them your employee handbook and any internal materials that will help add context about norms of your firm.

New hires might have the simplest of questions, such as “what is the dress code” - make sure you answer these FAQs in advance to make them feel more comfortable.

One thing that really helped us was emailing their week 1 schedule a week prior to their start date and offering to hold a call to answer any questions.

And of course, send them a swag box or a box of great books to read along with their laptops and equipment.

Step 2: Founders Story + Values

Within the first two weeks you need to share the firm’s mission and values as well as the “founder’s story” with new hires.

All of this helps add context for new hires to understand why the company operates the way it does and why the culture is the way it is.

Your founder’s story should be no more than 45 minutes.

To craft it, here are some helpful questions:

• Why (and when) did you start the firm? What problem were you trying to solve?

• What is your goal now? Where is the firm heading?

• What makes this firm unique?

• What were interesting wins or learning lessons along the way?

• What is the ideal culture you are trying to craft? Why is that important to you?

• What does each value really mean? Have the values changed over time? Why these values?

Step 3: Don’t Overload With Work

I’ve made this mistake many times: new hire joins and you immediately expect them to produce results.

The reason we do this is we feel we are spending a ton of money and we are impatient leaders wanting an immediate ROI.

But when you load a new hire up with work too early, all it does is burn them out.

You’ll experience higher turnover and lower levels of production firm-wide.

Instead, build an onboarding plan that allows the new hires plenty of time to ease into things.

For managers, don’t give them direct reports until after 30 days.

For associates and seniors, build a plan focused on meeting people / mentors throughout the firm and easing them into production (10-20% per week after two weeks).

Step 4: 30/60/90 Day Performance Milestones

Though we don’t want to overload new hires, we do want to set extremely clear milestones that they must accomplish in 30, 60, and 90 days.

30 day milestones will be largely training / networking based.

Again, we don’t want new hires to feel pressured to produce immediately (and this will be a challenge because often times new hires want to come in an immediately crush it for you to prove they are a great addition… fight that as much as possible).

60 Day milestones are focused on easing into production, gaining direct reports, and facilitating or participating in meetings the way you require your team to (for example, we have “the hall cpa way” to hold 1-1s… we don’t want to see new hires running their own script).

90 day milestones are focused primarily on production and output quality.

By 90 days, your new hire should be rocking and you should feel tension ease as work is redistributed to them and is moving through your workflow management system timely.

One tip: be careful assigning clients to new hires (regardless of level) too soon. We have learned not to assign clients before the 90 days are completed because if a new hire doesn’t cut it and needs to be removed, we don’t want clients to feel the disruption.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

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See you again next week.

Cheers,

Brandon

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