Page 217 - Successful Onboarding

The Onboarding Margin Life Support System • 201

enjoy their manager, are inspired by career opportunities, and understand
the culture, they will without any question forgive the company for not
performing optimally on Week One administration.
As we have stressed throughout this book, proper onboarding adminis-
tration goes way beyond the largely one-time only, transactional activities
of Week One. If you have a mentoring component of your onboarding
program, you’ll need to administer this component on an ongoing basis
(assignments, content, direction, oversight, timing, etc.). Every time a new
hire gets a mentor, the mentor requires notification and information about
the mentee’s background and the desired mentoring focus. Recruiting
managers always know things about the new hire’s point of view coming
into the organization, but in most companies today nobody captures this
information and effectively (and routinely) provides it to the mentor or,
worse, the hiring manager.
In a well-administered mentoring program, a process will exist to col-
lect information from the recruiter and hiring manager, store it in a cen-
tralized place (perhaps by leveraging existing software systems), offer it to
the mentor alongside guidelines for how to run mentoring meetings, auto-
matically schedule mentoring meetings on an ongoing basis, and dispense
reminder notices as appropriate. This process would also organize more
formal meetings at the key check points (e.g., 90-day, six-month, nine-
month, and annual reviews), instructing mentors to discuss the culture
and discuss development opportunities for the new hire, both in areas
where the new hire needs to improve and in areas of special interest to the
new hire. Without this process, the program will underperform (and from
our experience, it will materially underperform). On the other hand, a
well-administered mentoring process can provide a great experience from
the outset, getting new hires off to a positive start at the company. As men-
toring goes, leading corporations are increasingly doing a number of things
to systematize effective mentoring, including:

• Putting formal programs in place to identify at risk (those that
risk failing but should not) and high performing individuals
(those with great prospects, so long as the organization does not
fail them);
• Mandating frequent mentor meetings during onboarding to
handle new hire concerns and monitor progress;