Your new hire doesn’t need more training. They need a translator.

New hires taking too long to ramp? It’s probably not their fault.

It’s easy to blame “fit” or “experience.” But in most cases, slow onboarding is the result of unclear communication and unspoken norms.

New hires often experience this as:

✅ No clear expectations

✅ No guidance on when to ask for help vs. make a call

✅ No shared understanding of how the team communicates or makes decisions

For long-time team members, those ways of working feel intuitive. But the “obvious” systems that work for veterans aren’t second-nature to a new hire. Not yet.

Putting words to those operating principles won’t just help someone ramp faster. It gives your whole team a shared language to spot and fix misalignments.

And misalignments are expensive.

Every extra week it takes to ramp a new hire means more rework, more slack for the team to pick up, and more burn without output. Multiply that by your headcount plan, and the cost adds up fast.

Good onboarding isn’t just paperwork and product training. It’s making the implicit explicit so new hires have the scaffolding to act without second-guessing (and know when not to).

If your onboarding leaves people unsure what “good judgment” looks like, you’re already paying for that confusion.

Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes to name what everyone’s been doing by instinct. If your new hires aren't spinning up as quickly as you'd like, I'd love to chat.

Let's talk