What a new hire's first week reveals

A new hire's first week is a test of your operation, and you have already paid for it. Watch what happens after the desk and the login. If the plan is months of sitting beside one experienced person, the message is clear: the process lives in heads, not in the company.

Shadowing feels natural, but look at what it really is. There is nothing for the new hire to read: no steps, no example of a finished job, no map of where things are filed. So they watch one person and absorb that person's version of the work, habits and shortcuts included.

The bill is bigger than it looks. Your most experienced person loses months to repeating the same explanations. The new hire gets judged as slow, when the real gap is missing material. And if the teacher resigns halfway through, training starts again from zero, on somebody else's version.

A documented operation turns the same week upside down. The steps are written. A finished example sits next to them. The filing map says where everything lives. By the second or third day the new hire is doing small real tasks with the document open, and asking better questions.

Writing the job down for a stranger has a side effect veterans rarely expect. Steps nobody ever questioned suddenly need explaining, and some of them cannot be explained. That is not a documentation problem. That is a process problem you just found early, at the cheapest possible moment.

So run the test before the next hire. Could someone new do one useful piece of the job in week one, using only what is written today? If the answer is no, the company is renting its own operation from its employees. Start with the role you hire for most often, and write it down.