Culture-Backed Onboarding That Boosts Experience

What does it actually take to make a new hire feel valued before they have even logged in for day one? In the season four opener of CultureClub X, powered by CultureMonkey, host Diana Blass sits down with Melinda Honcoop, interim head of People Ops at care.com and founder of Agile in HR, an HR advising and consultancy, to dig into culture-backed onboarding and how it boosts candidate and employee experience.

Melinda brings two decades of people leadership to the conversation. She has been chief people officer at TCP Software and has held HR leadership roles at brands like Spiceworks-Ziff Davis, HomeAway.com, Blackbaud and Expedia. A self-described true at heart people nerd, she went to university intending to go into social work and found that workplaces needed a social work lens too.

Her core belief frames the whole episode: healthier workplaces make a healthier society, and onboarding is one of the most important yet overlooked parts of the employee lifecycle in which to build them. Across six questions, she and Diana cover remote onboarding, the 30-60-90 plan, Gen Z expectations, the role of senior leaders, onboarding technology, and the link between culture and hiring.

Why does remote onboarding need to be more than first day paperwork

Melinda's first move is to reframe the timeframe. Through automation and sheer busyness, onboarding often shrinks to a first day of signing paperwork and getting to know the company a little bit. She argues for taking it from a first day compliance activity to a two way conversation with the employee, one that is tailored to the individual rather than one size fits all.

That means learning who the person is, the strengths and personality they bring, and creating connection before they even start. Get the administrative first day activities done in advance, so the actual first day is about connection: what the role expects, what the first 30, 60 and 90 days will focus on, and how the manager defines success and impact.

In practice, Melinda starts by asking what her new employees look like, building what she calls user personas. A survey, a questionnaire or an insights assessment captures communication style and working preferences, which are then mapped against the team's own assessments and shared in advance, so manager and employee can have a natural conversation before day one.

The tailoring extends across career stages. Someone in their first job may need the nuts and bolts, help knowing what questions to ask a manager, even YouTube videos to prepare in advance. A senior executive needs the opposite: a first week of prepared stakeholder meetings, so they are not scrambling to work out their role and key stakeholders on their own.

Onboarding belongs to the whole employee lifecycle, not just new hires

Asked how critical onboarding is to the entire employee lifecycle, Melinda pushes back on the framing that onboarding is only a first welcome for external hires. If organizations reskill and upskill their talent, people get promoted and transfer into new roles and new teams. Those transitions deserve an onboarding experience too, and she says this is often missed, especially for new managers moving into management roles.

The same applies to mergers and acquisitions. When a company welcomes a whole new organization into its growth plan, applying onboarding thinking to that moment helps create something combined and new together. Put onboarding across the moments that matter in the journey, she argues, and you unlock incredible opportunities to make a difference.

The mechanism she favors is not a bulky career development plan document that sits off to the side and no one ever looks at. Instead, she builds little capsules of conversation into the one-on-ones managers already have: not just today's work, but what the employee wants to be doing six months or a year from now, and which cross-functional projects could help them reskill toward it.

How should managers build a 30-60-90 day onboarding plan

Melinda maps the 30-60-90 before the person even starts, ideally while writing the job description. Define what a fully functional person in the role looks like, then use the interview process to spot the gaps a candidate will bring with them. The first 90 days become a deliberate plan to develop that missing knowledge and experience.

The plan should move from knowledge acquisition to application: once someone has taken the knowledge in, what does it look like for them to actually produce with it in their day-to-day job? Breaking that into measurable milestones gives managers something concrete to track in one-on-ones, so they can see whether the person is ramping or not.

Hand holding is expected at first, but Melinda wants managers trained to know when it should wean off and the person should step fully into the role. And if the behavior is not changing, do not wait a year to say so. It does not feel good to miss expectations, which is why she points to companies like Notion moving away from annual performance conversations in favor of real-time ones.

What does Gen Z actually want from onboarding

Diana notes that younger generations are often labeled as too eager or unwilling to put the work in. Melinda's experience is different. Gen Z employees are not simply self-starting; they want a partnership with their manager and a map. Not a GPS that gets them there 100%, but a clear sense of how this role connects to what else is available in the organization.

So while the 30-60-90 focuses on getting someone up and running in the job today, for Gen Z it needs to be more than that. Melinda starts early conversations about mentors who can give exposure beyond the role, so a new hire can see what is next and build connection and community from the start.

That reframing matters. Many Gen Z employees could build solo careers, so the workplace has to offer what a solo path cannot: mentorship, community and people of different experiences. Unlocking that early is how organizations turn eager new joiners into committed ones.

What role should senior leaders play in welcoming new hires

Senior management involvement in onboarding is not about the direct supervisor. Melinda means skip levels: leaders above the immediate manager who can help remove the us versus them feeling and break down the glass layer between new hires and leadership. That connection is also, she notes, exactly what Gen Z wants.

A recorded welcome video is better than nothing, but a leader talking at someone is not a relationship. Melinda prefers small, informal groups, monthly or quarterly, where senior leaders meet new employees, talk about what they are working on, and leave time to hear insights back. New hires often carry perspective from experiences the leader has never had.

Timing matters too. She finds these sessions land best after someone has been there for 30 or 60 days, when their perspective is still fresh and they are not yet too deep in the weeds. The sessions also make leaders approachable: most have open doors, but new hires are afraid of the title until a real conversation breaks that barrier down.

Can technology reduce onboarding drop-off rates

With budgets tight in an uncertain economy, Melinda sees technology as the way to keep high-touch onboarding affordable. Automate the scheduling of onboarding meetings, run the pre-start assessments through a tool, track 30-60-90 plans in an automated system, and use survey tools to ask how onboarding is going and build baseline metrics.

Chatbots earn a specific mention. New hires ask IT, facilities and HR the same routine questions, and when humans answer them, they are pulled away from the strategic work they were hired to do. A centralized chatbot can give tailored, even location-specific answers while freeing the people team up.

The bigger prize is the data. Once onboarding runs through technology, you can quickly see whether you are hiring right. If people are not ramping within 90 days, the data points back to where the interview process missed something, creating an employee feedback loop that iterates recruitment. Managers are often siloed, Melinda says, and the data provides a signal they did not have before.

Does company culture really shape candidate experience and retention

Melinda's answer to the final question starts from a definition: culture is made up of the individuals of the organization, how they interact and how they behave. If a company can codify the behaviors and decision processes it wants to amplify, it can build those behavior expectations into the interview process and hire to its culture.

That alignment is not soft. Value and behavior misalignments, she observes, are where performance often starts to become difficult. Organizations that can see success at that granular level simply hire better, which flows straight into retention, employer branding and advocacy.

On culture-fit assessments, her caution is clear. Used too early or weighted too heavily, they risk undermining diversity, equity and inclusion. Used late, as one data point among three strong finalists, they can add a nuanced layer. Early in the process, she prefers simulating the real work environment in interviews and watching how candidates naturally behave with future team members.

Culture-backed onboarding starts with listening

Listen closely and every practice in this episode is a listening practice. User personas and pre-start assessments listen to who a new hire is. One-on-one career capsules listen to where they want to go. Skip-level sessions listen to their fresh perspective, and ramp-up data listens for the signals managers cannot see on their own.

That is the deeper argument underneath culture-backed onboarding: experience improves when organizations hear their people early and act on what they learn. It is the same principle that drives employee listening at every later stage of the lifecycle, from engagement surveys to exit conversations.

As Melinda puts it, healthier workplaces make a healthier society. Starting that health at the very first hello, before day one even begins, may be the most practical culture investment a people team can make this year.