Your interns and recent college grads need to start thinking and acting like business people right away. And I mean BEFORE they walk through your lobby doors their first day on the job!

It's often hard for new hires to do much of significance right away. They don't know your company, customers, systems and products well enough to contribute. All too commonly, they get assigned busy work that doesn't teach them much about your business, tax their brains or establish good work habits. And then they get into trouble! I can't tell you the number of frustrated managers and executives we talk to and stories we hear about new hires who waste their company's precious time watching movies, updating Facebook, checking boxscores, etc, etc, etc.

The answer is to make getting onboard and up to speed quickly a key objective for their first year on the job. They need to have tasks to complete and deadlines to meet that revolve around getting themselves educated and skilled at being a productive employee at your company. And their performance on these tasks must be part of their interim and annual reviews.

Managers today are swamped. It's easy for new hire development to fall through the cracks. Millennial employees need a well-structured plan to succeed and our two signature programs, ‘My Personal Onboarding Plan' and ‘Rocket to the Top', are just that. Check out the links below for the links to our tour pages that describe these programs in more detail.

In short, we've divided the first year of new hire development into seven key stages (the first one BEFORE they arrive at your company doors) with checklists of activities to complete, people to network with, questions to ask and lessons to learn. The activities, knowledge and skills at each stage get progressively more complex as your new hire learns and grows.

Give your new hire their checklist at each stage and they have concrete, productive tasks to accomplish. Add dates to each item and they have deadlines to meet. They'll start learning good work habits and you'll never hear “I didn't know what to do.” every again!

Managers find these checklists a great topic at regular one-on-one sessions. New hires can show what they've accomplished, bring up issues they've encountered and ask well-thought out questions. Managers can quickly assess their new hires progress, identify areas needing special attention, give feedback and collect information for performance reviews.

Let's be honest, some managers or locations do a great job onboarding new hires and some hardly bother. And during that crazy busy time of the year every company or department experiences, new hire development goes out the window for weeks or months.. A key benefit of our programs and checklists is that new hires receive a more consistent onboarding experience regardless of where they're located, when they start and who supervises them.

But, best of all, OnBoard Yourself, just as the name says, drives your new hires to get themselves onboard and up to speed. They become independent and productive more quickly than if they wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do next.