New Hire Onboarding Optimization Project

Problem

Ninety’s onboarding was fragmented, with content scattered across multiple platforms. New employees had no clear pathway, often felt confused or overwhelmed, and feedback consistently highlighted the disorganization and lack of cohesion. The material was also not aesthetically pleasing and failed to represent Ninety’s brand or company values, leaving a disconnect between the new hire experience and the culture we wanted to build. Additionally, progress was untracked, making it difficult to measure engagement or effectiveness.

Approach & Solution

To optimize onboarding, I:

  • Led the senior leadership team through a gap analysis, identifying where the current onboarding process fell short in clarity, usability, and alignment with company values. This collaborative process ensured buy-in and helped prioritize the most critical improvements.

  • Streamlined and centralized content in our native Knowledge Sharing Tool, creating clear, step-by-step pathways for new hires.

  • Designed the experience to be visually aligned with Ninety’s brand, reflecting our culture and values while improving usability.

  • Added interactive elements to track progress, using automations to push knowledge checks into Slack, enabling real-time monitoring and support.

  • Crafted Onboarding Feedback Surveys to inform Onboarding Indexes, providing quantifiable insights into engagement, experience, and areas for improvement.

  • Developed checklists and timelines to guide new hires through key milestones, reducing overwhelm and increasing clarity.

Together, these changes created a cohesive, branded, and measurable onboarding experience that better reflected company values while improving engagement and ramp-up time

Gap Analysis, Scoping, Designing

Measuring Efficacy

  • Established the first New Hire Onboarding Dashboard, creating visibility for leadership into onboarding health and trends.

  • Improved data quality and response rates by automating survey delivery and reminders, ensuring consistent feedback loops.

  • Integrated survey results into Slack via Zapier, making feedback visible in real time and prompting faster action from leaders.

  • Elevated onboarding reporting from static survey data to dynamic, branded indexes, enabling leadership to track progress and target improvements.

Key Indexes Included:

  • Experience Index: How supported, welcomed, and connected new hires felt.

  • Role Clarity & Training Index: How clearly new hires understood their roles and how effectively training prepared them.

  • Communication & Support Index: The quality of communication and support from teams, leaders, HR, and IT.

  • Onboarding Completion Score: How much assigned onboarding content was completed, showing engagement in self-paced learning.

The dashboard not only gave me the ability to make real-time improvements but also provided senior leadership with clear, data-driven visibility into the onboarding process. For the first time, executives could see how well new hires were being supported, where gaps remained, and how onboarding aligned with Ninety’s culture and values.

This visibility created accountability at the leadership level, ensured continuous improvement, and positioned onboarding as a strategic driver of employee success.

Original Onboarding in Google Classroom.