New Hire Onboarding

A global brokerage firm, with more than 10,000 Financial Advisors at the time, hired Gus Prestera and his team to redesign their new hire Financial Advisor program and address the problem that, despite investing millions into Associate hiring and onboarding, it yielded a poor return on investment.  The previous onboarding program relied completely on classroom training; consisted mostly of knowledge dumps and death by PowerPoint; and took too long to complete.  We were charged with redesigning the program to be more effective, more efficient, and less costly.  After mapping the skills that distinguished successful Financial Advisors, we developed a skill certification process and a fully blended curriculum that combined elearning self-study, experiential learning, case studies, online and in-person simulations, peer mentoring, and coaching.

We helped a manufacturer engineer a preboarding and onboarding process that could be applied and customized to different offices and plants around the globe. Preboarding involves many different departments and contributors, so it was important to get buy-in from a variety of stakeholders. The onboarding experience itself was structured around a two-day orientation led by HR, followed by a three-month, self-paced new hire curriculum made up of online videos, elearning modules, and assessments as well as in-person meetings, manager coaching, and peer mentoring. The experience was documented in an Onboarding Guide document given to all new hires.

We designed and built a series of onboarding guides for new hire sales reps and managers from different product groups. Each guide contained training calendars that were customized to each product group, org charts, contact information, links to online courses and resources, as well as answers to frequently asked questions. Sales managers had their own onboarding guide, linking to manager resources.

New people managers face all of the usual onboarding challenges and in addition they also need to build rapport with their direct reports, establish commitments, and get the team moving. This is often a long, rocky road. To accelerate this process, we help our clients facilitate assimilation meetings between new managers and their team. We have also developed training for HR business partners and business leaders to certify assimilation meeting facilitators. The process helps teams break the ice with their new manager, establish some commitments, and get moving in a new direction.

Senior leaders generally have a unique set of onboarding needs. Because they are often taking charge of entire business units, large departments, or global functions, these executives are expected to start driving change and delivering results almost immediately. Though perhaps unfair, given that they are still trying to learn the basics of how the company operates, that high expectation is a reality. To help new executives from a global financial services firm achieve those early wins, we designed an executive onboarding process that integrates a 90-day action planning process into their onboarding workflow.

In this 1.5 day workshop, learners are assigned cases; they work in teams to analyze their case and the client’s needs; they develop their recommendations; the next day, they deliver their recommendations to real clients–played by actors–who interact with them and ask questions. Afterward, they debrief, receiving feedback from the clients, their peers, and the moderator. The workshop developed the learners’ analytical skills, inter-personal communications skills, and consultative selling skills. In addition, it helped learners get a concrete sense of what real-world battle conditions entailed, which raised their game as they went through other portions of the curriculum.