Let’s get these statistics out there straight away: candidates / new employees who do not have an effective on-boarding process to go through with their employer are 22% more likely to leave within...
Josh Leichtung's insight:
Onboarding in a startup situation is different than onboarding in enterprise or more developed organizations. Early stage startups generally have no "rules", or at least very few standardized procedures. Therefore, it is imperative that whatever standardized procedures that exist, are well understood BEFORE YOUR HIRE!
Rules and procedures aside, the key to onboarding in an early startup is doing the right work in the interview process. Make sure the person you are hiring can visualize what a day will look like. Watch their body language, their face, and really listen to what they say. Here's your big chance to avoid a hiring mistake.
Create your startup's onboarding procedure BEFORE you do it. According to the article's statistics, new employees who do not have effective oboarding are 22% more likely to leave within 6 weeks of starting. Senior executives without proper onboarding are said to fail within the first 18 months. ( I don't know what % would fail anyway, but that 50% is huge one way or another.)
It might take half a day to create your onboarding procedure, and a few days to go through the process, but losing an employee and starting the recruiting process all over from scratch can take weeks.