How to Lose a New Hire in 5 Easy Steps: Classic Onboarding Mistakes
In our coaching, we often work through all the potential eventualities of leadership actions, including the negative ones. The negative consequences tend to be the most memorable. So today, in our onboarding coaching tip sheet for managers, we’re going to tell you what NOT to do, so the mistakes of others can forever stop you from making them yourself. So here goes!
So how do you lose a hire in 5 easy steps? After a 10-step interview process, and countless hours spent reviewing profiles, interviewing candidates, and sitting through final round presentations, all you have to do to ensure your new hire runs screaming in the other direction is to follow these five steps. Be sure to:
Put the new hire in charge of setting up their workspace. Don’t bother to order the new hire’s computer or add all the key applications necessary for them to do their jobs. Telling them to figure it out themselves helps them prove resourcefulness and grit. When they start on their first day, give them the number for the tech team and tell them to figure it out.
Give the new hire lots of unstructured time to “get their bearings.” Add to the unmoored, anxious feeling that comes with starting a new job and trying to figure out how to contribute, despite not really knowing how things work yet. Tell the new hire they can read industry news and figure out how to structure their own time so that they become self-reliant early on.
Only focus on long-term goals. Don’t worry about giving the new hire a sense of daily satisfaction, checking items off the list and documenting their learnings to date. Tell them they’ll have an impact “in due time” and test their patience and persistence.
Don’t waste time on the small details. The new hire will learn how things work around here on their own–no need to waste your time talking about things like dress code in the office, culture of company town halls, or cross-functional team interactions. A perfect test of independence.
Only give positive feedback in the early days. No one wants to hear criticism in the first days of a new job, so keep your negative critiques to yourself. Better to put it off and bring it up a year into the person’s tenure, setting off all kinds of questions about what else they were doing wrong all this time. Then again, don’t worry, your new hire won’t make it a year.
Want to learn how to keep a new hire instead? At CFW Careers, we’re here to support. We provide manager coaching to educate managers on new hire onboarding best practices and to engender managerial behaviors that cultivate growth in each new team member.
Contact our team to learn more.