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Ask HN: How to onboard our first full-time hire?

2 points by QuantumGood ↗ HN
A wonderful person has become available to our two-person (me and my wife) training company. They are able to learn our systems, and even provide some coaching help to our clients. (We coach dozens of clients each week, and maintain several repositories of content to assist in their training).

► How can I do in the very short term to help them us?

I keep feeling like I need to help them make more immediate gains, but am swamped simply trying to get them started while still doing my full-time job. Our project, task and admin management is poor, though we are improving rapidly (using ClickUp).

5 comments

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tboyd47
Get them access right away to every tool relevant to their job. It may sound obvious, but every time I’ve joined a team I’ve had to pull teeth to get access to all the things I need, and it lasts for weeks.
QuantumGood
Thanks! That was our first idea, but implementation has probably been sub-par. I'll work out a way to help them help us get them onboarded to the tools.
rovr138
It's probably a good idea to sit down and document all the services you have and use.

List them, credentials, what you use from them, how you use it. Just a sentence or two. Doesn't have to be complicated or super detailed, but it'll help everyone a lot.

As questions come up about them, start expanding on the description for them answering them.

That document will make onboarding more people easier in the future. It might make sense to split it into a document for each in the future as it grows, but start small.

QuantumGood
Thanks! Yeah, I started on that awhile ago. Learning from our knowledge base and updating it is helpful, but I'm trying to think in terms of "this is the best order to do things in" for maximum benefit during onboarding, instead of feeling simply that I'm working overtime to "get onboarding done in as short a time period as possible".
rovr138
I personally like learning by digging into things.

However, some people do like having a walkthrough. I've done both when onboarding someone.