You didn't hire the wrong person — you onboarded them wrong

is a bit of a follow-up from a previous episode we did.

I'll get into that in a minute, but...

As I was starting to think through what I was going to talk about in this episode, my mind really went back to the very first job I ever had and perhaps what you might consider a not so great onboarding experience that I went through.

Here's what happened.

It was my very first job.

I was maybe 16 years old.

And I went in for my first day of work and they handed me a training manual.

Nothing unusual about that.

Other than this thing was not just a stapled packet.

This thing was a binder.

I mean, it was as big, as thick as the old phone books.

And they sat me down at a table and they said, read this.

That was day one.

Read this binder.

That was the plan.

So I read it for about six hours and I remember somewhere around probably hour two that I really started to negotiate with myself about how much of this I was actually going to read.

And somewhere around hour three, I think I actually stopped reading and I was just pretending to read and pretending to absorb anything and just started turning pages to look like I was actually doing something.

And I remember thinking, even back then, as a brand new 16, 17 year old who really had no business questioning anything on day one, I remember thinking, this seems like a really strange way to teach a person a job.

And it turns out all these many years later, there's actually a whole body of research that agrees with teenage me.

Which is either validating or terrifying, depending on how you look at it.

So back to the episode that I mentioned before.

This is somewhat of a follow-up to that.

If you caught that episode, go back a few.

The title was, Why Your Gut is a Terrible Hiring Manager.

And we spent the entire episode on the front half of this problem today.