You only get one shot at a first impression.
And when you’ve spent a good chunk of your salary budget on an amazing new director or executive leader, you want to make sure the impression you make is helps them to know they’ve made the right choice.
The quality of your executive onboarding programme will go a long way to helping new senior level hires feel welcomed. More crucially, though, a high-quality onboarding process is likely to increase both the longevity of your new hire and their value to the company.
As 40 percent of executives hired at the senior level don’t stay more than 18 months in their new role, making sure they get off to the best possible start is crucial. Putting the time and effort into creating a comprehensive executive onboarding plan for your director-level and executive-level new starters will pay dividends.
Here are a few tips for getting it right:
Start before the start date
Whilst the official onboarding may not begin until their first day, if you really want to make an excellent first impression, our advice is to start before they start.
You can do this in several ways. The most obvious, and arguably the most important is to send them relevant company information in advance of their start date. Make sure they have practical information like standard operating hours, on and off-site facilities (including lunch options), company structures and bios of their colleagues.
Less obviously though, it’s also a great opportunity to lay out the main areas of focus, basic expectations for the first 30 and 90 days, the initiatives that are most important to the company at the current moment.
Giving your new executive or senior leader an insight into this information before they arrive enables them to be thinking strategically about how to approach their first few weeks in the role. This means they’ll hit the ground running, and feel useful and productive from day one.
People oriented executive onboarding
Make sure the first weeks of your new leader’s time is spent with people – and people at all levels within the company. The teams they’ll be involved with, adjacent teams, other leaders in the business, partners and suppliers. All these interactions will do more to build a clear picture of how the organisation works and what it stands for than watching corporate induction videos will.
If you want your executive onboarding to make a great impression, ensuring these meetings are pre-scheduled in their diaries will help any new leader to not only feel welcome and productive, but also how people centred the organisation is. It’ll help them to see that all voices are listened to and considered important, which makes for a fantastic start for any executive level candidate.
Cross departmental
It’s important that your executive onboarding doesn’t occur in a silo. No matter what role they’ve come in to play, having a full overview of all departments will be crucial for any executive or leadership position. From the very beginning of their journey with you, give them opportunities to work and meet cross departmentally.
Having a cross departmental overview from the outset will lay the foundations for great relationships going forward, but also a clearer understanding of how the company runs, what makes it tick, what the different goals, priorities and agendas are. All of this will make them better at what they do, but also help them to feel completely integrated into the company they have joined – which is great for longevity!
Ongoing support
Finally, use your onboarding programme to outline the ways in which your new senior hire will be supported both in the short term and in the long term. Leadership positions come with a huge amount of pressure and responsibility, If you really want to make a first impression that will cement their decision to join you, show them how seriously you take executive and leadership support.
Show them what internal and external support mechanisms are in place to help them succeed and thrive in their new position. Show them that support doesn’t end when their onboarding finishes, but transitions into meaningful relationships and support networks.
How much thought have you put into your executive onboarding?
Your onboarding speaks volumes about your company – it sets the tone for the things your organisation views as important. It is the foundation on which your new senior leader will build their strategy – not just their strategy for the business, but their strategy for the way they interact with people within the organisation, the way they talk about the company, their long term vision for their role with you.
So when you’re putting together an executive onboarding programme make sure it sings, because it could be the difference betweeen a 2 year position and a 20 year one.
