Startups love to talk about culture. The ping pong tables, the unlimited PTO, the “we’re like a family” pitch. But ask them what happens after someone accepts the offer, and you’ll get a blank stare.
Most tech companies treat onboarding as a checkbox. Sign the paperwork, get a laptop, figure out the rest. It works fine with five people in a room. It falls apart completely at 20, 50, or 100.
Why onboarding breaks when you scale
Small teams onboard through osmosis. A new person sits next to the founder, asks questions, and picks things up. No process needed because everyone knows everything.
Then you grow. Suddenly, the founder is in back-to-back meetings. The person who knew all the context left six months ago. Tribal knowledge lives in Slack threads nobody can find.
New hires show up excited. Two weeks late,r they’re frustrated and confused. Nobody meant for it to happen. It just did.
The cost nobody calculates
Here’s what bad onboarding actually costs you:
A developer making $120K who takes an extra month to become productive just burned $10,000. Multiply that by ten hires per year, and you’ve wasted $100K on slow ramp-ups alone.
That’s before turnover. Engineers who feel lost in their first 90 days are twice as likely to quit. Replacing them costs another 6 months of salary in recruiting and training.
You’re spending money on ping pong tables while hemorrhaging cash on broken onboarding. The math doesn’t work.
What actually fixes this
The companies that get onboarding right do a few things differently.
They write things down. Not a 50-page handbook nobody reads. Short docs that answer the questions every new hire asks in week one. Where to find things. Who to talk to. How decisions get made.
They make someone responsible. Not “ask anyone if you need help.” A specific person is responsible for each new hire’s first 30 days. They check in daily. They answer the dumb questions so the new person doesn’t feel stupid asking.
They automate the admin stuff. Equipment requests, document collection, training, and task assignments. All of it can run on autopilot with tools like FirstHR, so managers can focus on actual onboarding rather than chasing signatures.
They set clear expectations. New hires should know exactly what “doing well” looks like at day 7, day 30, and day 90. Ambiguity kills motivation.
The uncomfortable truth
Most founders think their onboarding is fine. They hired smart people. Smart people figure it out.
But “figuring it out” means three weeks of confusion that could have been three days. It means new hires forming opinions about your company based on chaos instead of competence.
Your onboarding is the first real experience people have with your company after all those nice interviews. Make it count, or watch good people walk out the door, wondering what happened.
