Even the most experienced new hire needs a little time to get up to speed. Imagine an idealised version of the onboarding process: you hire based on your recruitment process, lovingly crafted to validate proven experience in your industry; you bring them in and pass them from milestone to milestone, navigating assessments or certifications along the way. After demonstrating their knowledge and competence, you then release them into the company’s ecosystem and let them get on with it. They’re like a baton, passed flawlessly from hand to hand in a productivity relay race. The stages may flex to take account of individual capability or background, but they remain the same for each new hire.
The long road to performance
How long it takes that new hire to ramp up to full productivity is up for debate. A Gallup study suggested that for knowledge workers it could be up to twelve months. A report by the APQC has the best performing companies averaging twenty-five days, with the worst taking more than fifty. And yes, the parameters will vary depending on the complexity of the role, but even the most optimistic data measures the time in months. Months which cost the business and slow down the team.
What is assumed, in all of these cases, is that because a well-articulated job advert hooked the new hire in question, and because of that new hire’s education and experience, they have precisely the skills the organisation needs to fulfil the role in question. Which is the first crucial flaw in the process.
Sadly, onboarding processes tend to rely on generic materials and content: the current sales deck; the employee handbook; details about key clients or partners. It’s important stuff which needs to be done. But it’s also a missed opportunity.
Why skills are the bedrock of success
In those first precious weeks of the onboarding process, new hires are like sponges – absorbing everything which is thrown at them. They’re ready to learn – in fact, they’re desperate to learn. Does it do their appetite justice to put them through that relay race – a generic, siloed journey from one self-contained stop to another – when there’s an opportunity not just to find out the specifics of their skills and competencies, but to coach them to develop and enhance those skills from the moment they walk through the door? In fact, there’s another, even more pertinent question sitting behind all this: who owns skills? Or, to be precise, who defines the skills, proficiency levels and expectations across the organisation? Because that’s what we’re really looking for when we hire – a set of skills which will accomplish key tasks as effectively as possible.
Even organisations far-sighted enough to hire and manage people in a skills-based context may have competing functions here. Talent acquisition, whose role is to profile, engage and pursue the best candidates and fill the roles with the very best talent. The core HR team, who may be able to look at the challenge in a more holistic way but for whom the hiring process is one of many, many calls on their time. Or a separate Learning and Development team, who all too often are expected to create (or duplicate) generic “cookie cutter” onboarding pathways which lack the capability to adapt, or to reflect the real development needs of the individual learner. And so the baton is passed from hand to hand, with each doing their part in isolation, and crucial opportunities being missed.
There are ever more organisations looking to put skills at the heart of their business – to ask the question “what skills do we have, and what skills do we need?”. They take a clear-eyed look at what the business needs now and in five or ten years; and they hire and plan succession on that basis. And the timing is perfect, because HR’s own evolution is supporting this change. Engagement tools which encourage regular input and feedback are now commonplace. Performance management tools which promote frequent conversations between line managers and employees are widespread. Onboarding should be embracing these opportunities to encourage new hires to self-assess, and for managers to proactively identify areas where new skills can be learned or existing ones reinforced. And that knowledge can lead to truly bespoke, personalised onboarding experiences with productivity and business value at their heart: a strategy which the modern CHRO, who worries as much about the share price as they do the Glassdoor rating, will appreciate.
The shortcut to a skills-led culture
Of course, most businesses have nowhere near the requisite resources to plan, publish and prompt an entirely bespoke onboarding journey for each employee. But timing, once again, is on our side. It’s perfectly possible to map the skills employees have, identify gaps and suggest tailored training to address those gaps. Twenty years ago, it would have taken even an assiduous, coaching-led manager months to learn their teams’ strengths, weaknesses and preferences. Now, it can be done in days and weeks as part of a largely automated process, while at the same time mapping those skills against an organisational skills framework designed to create, at a fundamental tasks-to-skills level, a company which is truly fit for purpose.
Skills are organisational DNA. If the purpose of hiring is to acquire skills in order to accomplish tasks, then the way we think of them should be threaded throughout the employee lifecycle. What do we need? What do we have? And to what degree? Not only that, how do we promote, at every step, the idea that skills growth is not just encouraged but required? Great managers instinctively find moments to connect with their people and to identify how best to support them. Strong learning cultures show, from the top down, that time enhancing skills is time well spent. Feedback loops enable effective conversations about which skills are needed and at what level and cadence to deliver the right learning, at the right time. All of these things have existed for years. It just takes a little rigour to see the connections, and the right tech to apply them.
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