Onboarding statistics, the four-stage journey, and the edge cases most standard programs miss.
Conducted by Jane Fan and Tammy Rainey
This companion is the resource half of an onboarding conversation. The live session, conducted by Jane Fan and Tammy Rainey, walked the baHRC community through the statistics that define poor and great onboarding, the four-stage journey that moves a candidate from signed offer to 90-day review, and the moment where HR stops being the cat herder and becomes the conductor. Then the room took over — mid-to-senior HR practitioners sharing what they've seen work and what still needs to be fixed.
The pages below are built to be read in the places where you actually read things. On your phone, at lunch, in the car, one-handed. Tap any section to go deeper.
The complete session content — statistics, definitions, the Cat Herder versus Conductor framing, the four-stage journey from pre-boarding through the first 90 days, and how to measure whether it worked. Conducted by Jane Fan and Tammy Rainey.
Read the slides → Part II · Edge CasesA practitioner reference: third-party hires, remote employees, contractors, interns, boomerangs, internal transfers, executives, visa-dependent hires, acquisition employees, part-time and job-share arrangements, crisis hires. California-specific legal hooks flagged. These are prompts, not checklists.
Work through the edge cases →Different people in any HR audience need different things from a session like this. The three resources below pick up where the session ends — tactical for the hands-on practitioner, conceptual for the operator running the tune-up, strategic for the leader who has to sell the business case upstairs. Different doors. Same building.
Cheat sheets and templates you can take to the desk on Monday. Pre-boarding checklist, day one checklist, week one checklist, the 30/60/90 plan, a welcome email template, and a 30/60/90 goal-setting template. Each one print-styled and downloadable as a one-page PDF.
Grab the cheat sheets → Operational · The Tune-UpA three-column tune-up — bold orientation moves worth borrowing in column one, the seven-step plan for keeping the balance tilted toward conductor in column two, and what striving along the continuum earns for the company, the manager, HR, and the new employee in column three. Conductor framed as a continuum, not a finish line.
Run the tune-up → Strategic · The Business CaseTalk tracks for seven C-Suite roles — CEO, CFO, COO, CMO, CHRO, CTO/CIO, General Counsel. Each track includes the opening line, the cited supporting statistics, the ask, and the predictable pushback with a counter. Built to be bookmarked and referenced before the conversation.
Read the talk tracks →The statistics and frameworks matter. But the reason onboarding matters is in messages like this one — the kind that arrive months after someone joins, from someone who remembers being welcomed.
Bay Area Human Resources Connections (baHRC) is a community of HR and People professionals that meets for working sessions like this one — where practitioners at every level share what they've seen, what they've built, and what still needs to be figured out. Crowdsourced sessions exist to give members voice, surface expertise from the room, and build professional capital across the community.