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The Business Case for Onboarding • 37

Self-actualization

Esteem

Love/Belonging

Safety/Security

Physiological

– ONBOARDING’S IMPACT – RECRUITING’S IMPACT
Figure 1.3 Potential of Recruiting and Onboarding to Satisfy Maslow’s Hierarchy
of Needs

ordering a drink), or advocating an idea too stridently. As will be seen in
subsequent chapters, onboarding gives employees the skills, knowledge,
personal relationships, and cultural awareness to achieve a level of secu-
rity in an organization.
Onboarding also provides employees with a sense of “fitting in” at work,
corresponding to what Maslow sees as the third-level human need for love
and belonging. Onboarding’s interpersonal network development element
gives employees a head start in making friends and allies within a firm.
Onboarding also helps employees build relationships by giving them the
skills they need to do their jobs well. When employees perform sooner and
at a higher level than their bosses and peers expected—when they stay
longer than the average employee and take the company’s mission as their
own—their colleagues, bosses, and the company as a whole take notice
and begin to “love” them. It may sound strange to speak about love in the
context of managing human capital in an organization, but every execu-
tive we speak with quickly speaks about the junior employees they have
worked with over the years with whom they just “loved” because of their
strengths as an employee. Some hiring managers claim—tongue in
cheek—that finding an employee you love in this context is as hard or
harder than finding romantic love. In a workplace setting, “love” translates