Hiring & Onboarding Checklist

Decide what the role must deliver before you meet anyone, ask every candidate the same questions against the same anchors, and plan the first ninety days around real work, clear expectations and the people the newcomer needs to know.

Structured interviews are strong research (Campion, Palmer & Campion, 1997; review: Levashina et al., 2014). Hiring for "fit" tends to drift toward similarity (Rivera, 2012); "culture add" is a practitioner term with no academic test. Research on how newcomers adjust is strong (Bauer et al., 2007); the 30-60-90 plan is practice, not research (Watkins, 2003). Stage lengths, timings and targets on this page are rules of thumb.

Use it when:

• You are opening a role, replacing someone, or growing the team, and want a decision you can defend.
• Several people interview and you want their judgments to be comparable instead of anchored on the loudest voice.
• Someone starts soon and you want their first three months planned around real work, not a pile of reading.

Skip it when:

• You need to see where candidates drop out or which channels work: use 4.15 Recruitment Funnel Map.
• You want to audit how good your selection methods are across many hires: use 4.16 Selection Quality Scorecard.

Few management questions have as much hard evidence behind them as selection, and the evidence favors structure over intuition. When every candidate gets the same questions, behavioral prompts and scoring rules, the interview becomes one of the best predictors of later job performance, because structure leaves less room for the biases a free conversation invites (Campion, Palmer & Campion, 1997). Culture is the trap: in Rivera's (2012) study of elite firms, "fit" often meant choosing people who resembled the interviewers. So this page asks about values and about what a candidate adds, never about likeness.

Onboarding has strong research on what helps newcomers settle: knowing what the job demands, feeling able to do it, and being accepted by colleagues (Bauer et al., 2007). The day plan used to organize that is practitioner craft (Watkins, 2003). The limit: a good process improves the odds, it does not guarantee a good hire.

Write what the hire must achieve, then the few must-haves that make it possible. Each must-have needs a way to test it.

Strong answer: "Problem: night-shift output varies widely between crews. Outcome in year one: one standard work routine on all three lines. Must-have: has led a shift through a process change; tested by a behavioral question and a reference." Not: "Team player, self-starter."

The problem this hire solves:

What success looks like after twelve months (two or three outcomes):

Nice-to-haves (do not screen on these):

Pay range, stated in the ad:

Illustrative example: the roles, the company and all details are made up.

A family-owned bakery group in Denmark hires a shift lead for its night production.

Section 1: the problem is uneven output between crews. Year-one outcome: one standard routine on all three lines. Must-haves: has led a shift through a change (behavioral question and reference); reads production data (short work sample). Nice-to-have: food safety certificate, since it can be trained.

Section 2: the production manager asks about leading change, a line operator asks about collaboration, HR asks the values question. Anchors were written before the first interview.

Section 3: the three scorecards came in before the debrief. Two interviewers scored the second candidate higher on leading change, with examples; the first candidate was the most likable, but the evidence was thin. Offer to the second.

Section 4: a senior baker from the same line is the buddy; the first task is to map one changeover.

Section 5: by day 60 the new lead runs the Monday crew meeting. At the 90-day review she says the night crews still go to her predecessor with questions; the manager agrees to move that handover forward.