Onboarding – Part I

VP Finance: You really didn't see this one coming. It is three weeks to fiscal year-end close, and your Controller gives two weeks' notice that she is moving to a lower pressure job in a warmer climate. Frantically, you work to absorb the whys and wherefores of every spreadsheet, even as your controller spends her day negotiating with moving companies. You race through resumes and setup interviews, all of which set you back still further on the year-end closing. Then, EUREKA, you find a solid candidate from a Fortune 100 Company and she accepts your offer. Now you can start to close the books, although two weeks behind and with double the workload.

New Controller:  You are an up-and-coming financial manager with a flurry of job offers. You accepted this one with a small company because you knew your performance in this job was vital to their success. That sense of being central to the company was what was missing at your Fortune 500 Company.

You are greeted on your first day by a harried Administrator, who gives you a stack of forms and handbooks and puts you in the conference room, "until the Controller's office can be waded through." After a week, it hasn't gotten much better. Your bleary-eyed boss pops in periodically with a, "Hang in there!" and you realize, with a jolt, that you have memorized the entire first page of your insurance certificate of coverage. 

Then you get the call. The last company you interviewed with makes you an offer. Right now, it is sounding good. Very good.

This scenario is only slightly exaggerated. Between recruiting costs, agency fees and salary and benefits paid to someone who is not yet adding value, the cost of a failed hire is upwards of $100,000 at a managerial level. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, half of the new hires at this level fail within 18 months! A well-conceived, well-executed onboarding process matters.

Following three onboarding rules will make your selection efforts most likely to pay off:

1. Don't assume the deal is closed just because the new hire is on the payroll. As our illustration shows, the new hire is just off an intensive interviewing gig. Previous offers may still be on the table and new ones may still roll in. Treat the new person like you would a valued new purchase you place strategically, protect from harm and continually take notice of when you pass by.

2. Have a written plan and stick to it. The blindsided VP of Finance in our example just wanted to get past the crisis before attending to the new Controller, but he bought himself a bigger mess. Written plans, signed off by key players, commit and remind everyone of the goal.

3. Devote the first 90 days to acculturation and competency-building. Orientation is just the tip of the iceberg. New people succeed best when given a well-orchestrated blend of ramped-up job responsibilities and relationship-building with key players within and outside the department and company.

Common sense? Yes. But so is ordering the fruit instead of french fries. It takes focused intent to do what we need to do.

A solid onboarding process eats into everyone's time. On Covey's time management grid, it is at least an "important but not (wildly) urgent" item, easily nudged aside by what is "important and urgent" or simply "urgent." But life is best lived when we pay close attention to that too-often ignored category. Onboarding a new manager into the company is a vivid case in point.