There’s something cruel about January onboarding.
You’ve spent November and December hiring like mad… trying to fill roles before year-end, trying to hit headcount targets, trying to start the new year ready to execute.
Then January arrives and everyone’s exhausted. Your team is recovering from the holiday sprint. Leadership is buried in budget reviews and annual planning. And somewhere in all of this chaos, you’ve got five new people starting on Monday who need to be brought up to speed.
I’ve watched this pattern play out more times than I can count.
When informal breaks down
The new hires show up eager and ready to contribute. But the people who are supposed to onboard them are completely overwhelmed. So what happens? They get the basics… laptop, email account, access to Slack. Maybe a quick intro meeting. Then they’re left to figure things out on their own while everyone else gets back to work.
It’s not malicious. It’s just bad timing.
The real problem is that we treat onboarding like an event instead of a system. When things are calm and you’re only bringing on one person at a time, you can get away with the informal approach. Someone has time to walk them around, make introductions, answer questions as they come up.
But when you’re scaling and hiring in batches… especially during periods when your existing team is already stretched thin… informal doesn’t work anymore.
The first month struggle
Here’s what I see happening in most companies…
New hires spend their first two weeks trying to piece together how things actually work. They’re afraid to ask too many questions because everyone seems so busy. They sit through meetings where people reference projects and processes they’ve never heard of. They smile and nod and feel increasingly lost.
By week three, they’ve formed their own conclusions about how things operate. And half of those conclusions are wrong. But now those misunderstandings are baked in. They’ll spend the next six months operating on incomplete or incorrect information.
The people who survive this are the ones who are naturally aggressive about seeking out information. They’re comfortable interrupting people. They’re good at reading between the lines and filling in the gaps themselves.
But you’re also losing people during this period. The ones who needed more structure. The ones who interpreted the chaos as a sign that maybe this wasn’t the right fit after all.
The January collision
What makes January particularly brutal is the collision of competing priorities.
Everyone’s focused on new quarterly goals. There’s pressure to hit the ground running after the holiday break. Leadership wants to see immediate results from the new team members they just invested in hiring.
But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t demand immediate productivity while also expecting new hires to magically absorb everything they need to know through osmosis.
The companies that handle this well are the ones who’ve systematized their onboarding before they need to. They’ve documented their processes. They’ve recorded their thinking. They’ve created a clear path that new people can follow even when everyone else is underwater.
This isn’t about having a perfect employee handbook or a fancy learning management system. It’s about making sure the foundational knowledge… the stuff everyone needs to know about how your company actually operates… exists somewhere other than people’s heads.
The compounding cost
Because here’s the thing about January onboarding…
The people you’re bringing in right now are the ones who are going to carry your company through the next year. If they start off disconnected and confused, that confusion compounds. They make decisions without full context. They duplicate work that’s already been done. They miss opportunities because they don’t understand what’s actually important.
And by the time you realize there’s a problem, you’re six months in and they’ve developed their own workarounds and assumptions about how things should work. Unwinding that is infinitely harder than getting it right from the start.
So if you’re planning to hire in December or onboard people in January… and you don’t have a structured system for bringing them up to speed… you’re not setting them up to succeed.
You’re setting them up to survive. And survival isn’t the same as alignment.