The onboarding audit, on one page

The question

Onboarding is where the most measurable money sits and the least attention goes. It is also the easiest thing in HR to audit honestly, because the people who can tell you what is broken joined recently enough to remember.

This is the audit I use. It takes an afternoon.

The audit

Before day one

• Does the person know who their manager is, and has that manager spoken to them?
• Is the equipment ordered, and does anyone own the fact that it has not arrived?
• Is there a named person, not the manager, they can ask an obvious question?
• Does anyone contact them between signing and starting?

The first week

• How many hours go on compliance training that could be spread across a month?
• Is there any real work in the first five days?
• Does the manager have a scheduled conversation at the end of it?
• Can they name three people outside their immediate team?

The first ninety days

• Is there a written definition of what good looks like at ninety days?
• Has the manager had a conversation about it, or only completed the paperwork?
• Do you know your ninety-day attrition rate, broken down by function?
• If someone is struggling at day sixty, who notices?

What this means for you

Score each question yes or no, then look at where the no answers cluster rather than the total.

Clustering before day one usually means an ownership gap between recruitment and the line. Clustering in the first week usually means onboarding has been designed for the organization's compliance needs rather than the person's. Clustering at ninety days usually means there is no definition of success to check against, which is also why performance conversations later feel arbitrary.

The most common single finding, by a distance, is the last question in the middle section. Nobody checks in at the end of the first week, because everyone assumes somebody else did.

Where I can help

Onboarding is unusually responsive to attention, which is why it is a good first project. On one enterprise programme, streamlining driver onboarding by 35 percent contributed $800K of additional topline revenue, simply by getting people productive sooner.

If the audit surfaces something you want to act on, that work is usually a redesign of the first ninety days with the line rather than for them, plus the measurement to know whether it moved.