This is a story about a well-meaning and successful company that hires a great candidate, but is surprised and disappointed to see the hire fail.

THEY WERE QUALIFIED, SO WHAT HAPPENED?

Busy teams are rightly thrilled to hire experienced people familiar with their industry challenges.

But it’s easy to assume because these people are experienced in the industry that they will require a minimum of onboarding, training, and coaching support to start contributing.

“We don’t need to slow down to hire this person!”

The team underestimates the uniqueness with which they have designed their culture and processes.

The range of possible assumptions is large.

  • Definitions
  • Procedural steps
  • Behavior
  • Problem-solving communication

The new employee feels like a fish out of water with a team they don’t know and systems they are untrained on. They feel unsupported through the transition. Perhaps they feel judged for not immediately contributing.

The team begins to questions the skillset of their new team member.

IT’S THE BEGINNING OF THE END

The newly hired teammate feels set up for failure and finds a new job where they can be successful. Their industry experience is not used as a substitute for specific company training and onboarding, so they succeed

Blame shifting is common in toxic companies.

“Well they weren’t doing so well anyways.” “They failed to make a difference.” Etc, etc, etc…

This can be quite the helpful team learning opportunity, which I explore more in this article about Building Your Competitive Advantage Gap From Bad Hires, Reflection, And Vulnerability.

It’s easy to take new employee cultural and process inculcation for granted. DON’T!

WHAT WENT WRONG?

  • Leadership used the employee’s experience to justify an assumption about their (lack of) onboarding and training needs
  • Leadership hired without recognizing their unique responsibility to this employee to give them everything they need to be successful
  • Leadership failed to check in sufficiently to recognize the problem
  • Leadership failed to coach their team sufficiently to recognize and respond to the low morale a struggling employee will have

Leadership, leadership, leadership. Everything resolves down to a leadership problem.

But what if it’s someone else’s mistake?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_nb1uYHtcJg%3Fwmode%3Dopaque%26enablejsapi%3D1

LESSONS TO IMPLEMENT NEXT TIME

  • Create a culture of welcome and support for new hires. The team is here to make them successful and their eager enthusiasm to help with lower barriers to good questions for the newbie. If you have a high-performance team, and a careful hiring process, then the team should understand the investment being made into each hire. That investment demands cultivation.
  • Explain each layer of your company. From values and philosophy to systems, to processes, to expected behaviors, and commonly used terms. Don’t assume because it is obvious to you that it will be obvious to them.This can be done in a handbook, a conversation, or a video.The process of explaining will also be good for leaders to bring from the subconscious to the conscious. It’s common for core cultural values to remain unspoken for years.It is also incredibly common for experienced practitioners to be terrible teachers because they have forgotten what it was like to not know how to do something. These are the wrong choice to manage onboarding. Appoint patient teachers who will enjoy the process of helping that person be successful.
  • Use regular relational check-ins to detect and address issues earlier.“What’s been challenging lately?”“You have a new perspective on working here. Where do you think we can improve your training?”“How is your relationship with *insert critical relationship* developing?”
  • Good onboarding takes years. Onboarding is about alignment. Alignment changes as people change. You might not be training the processes and introducing them to other teammates anymore, but you should be coaching to an ever-closer alignment with the company vision.

IF ALL ELSE FAILS

If you do have to fire them, don’t make it a surprise. Surprise firings reveal lack of communication about problems and appropriate action to resolve them.

You can read more on the inefficacy and the team morale hit surprise firings create in our article: You’re Fired; The Efficacy and Ethics of Surprise Firing

Questions, answered

The short version.

Why do experienced hires fail even when they are fully qualified?
Because the team assumes industry experience means minimal onboarding, training, and coaching. Companies underestimate how unique their own culture and processes are, so the new employee ends up a fish out of water with a team they do not know and systems they are untrained on, feeling unsupported and judged for not contributing immediately.
Do experienced construction hires still need onboarding?
Yes. Industry experience is not a substitute for company-specific training and onboarding. Assumptions pile up around definitions, procedural steps, behavior, and problem-solving communication, and when a struggling new hire feels set up for failure, they find a new job where they can succeed.
Who is responsible when a new hire struggles and leaves?
Leadership. The failure chain runs through leadership using experience to justify skipping onboarding, not recognizing their responsibility to give the employee everything needed to succeed, failing to check in enough to catch the problem, and failing to coach the team to respond to a struggling employee's low morale. Blame shifting onto the departed hire is common in toxic companies.
How should a company onboard an experienced new hire well?
Create a culture of welcome where the team understands the investment being made, explain every layer of the company from values to systems to commonly used terms, and appoint patient teachers rather than experienced practitioners who have forgotten what not knowing feels like. Then use regular relational check-ins like "what's been challenging lately" to detect issues early.
How long does good onboarding take?
Years. Onboarding is about alignment, and alignment changes as people change, so even after process training ends, leaders should keep coaching toward ever-closer alignment with the company vision. And if a hire ultimately has to be let go, it should never be a surprise, because surprise firings reveal a failure to communicate problems and act on them.