Recruiting should own new hires for the first 90 days
Imagine you’re a highly talented A-player starting a new job.
You walk into the office to start this new opportunity… and the general attitude is “Oh, wait, you’re starting today?”
Your work area is bare.
Your laptop is “on the way.”
Your manager is busy.
You spend the morning twiddling your thumbs and trying to look useful – even though you’re not sure what you’re supposed to be doing.
Does this first-day experience make you think this is a competent company? A place you want to spend a precious chunk of your career?
Early in my own career I had versions of this experience even at very large, successful companies.
It is, sadly, a very common experience:
Gallup finds that only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job onboarding new employees. (Source)
This kind of sloppy start often signals a subpar onboarding process for the weeks that follow. The new hire isn’t sure who is who on the team, what resources are at their disposal, what processes they need to learn, what their goals should be, or how their role actually creates business value.
The fix is simpler than most companies realize:
Recruiting should “own” the new employee for the first 90 days.
Most managers are already running a team. Dropping full onboarding responsibility on them often results in the scenario above.
When recruiting / HR / your People Department retains ownership of onboarding through Day 90, the new hire gets a structured installation into the company.
From the moment they start, recruiting should be ready to give the employee a firm grounding for success:
Here’s your equipment, fully set up and ready to go
Here’s our mission and vision – why we exist
Here are the values that differentiate us
Here are the priorities the company is focused on right now
Here are the people you need to know
Here’s how we do goals and what’s expected of you in the first quarter
Etc. etc.
In these first 90 days, recruiting can also pair new hires together when timing allows. Having someone else who is also learning everything for the first time accelerates cultural absorption and saves everyone time.
A well-supported first 90 days is the foundation A-players need to contribute at a high level quickly.
It’s also a retention issue.
If you’ve done the hard work of recruiting exceptional talent and then hand them a disorganized welcome, you are actively undermining the investment you just made.
Top performers have options.
They notice.
Some of them leave.
Keep the top talent you worked so hard to hire by making sure recruiting owns their success in the first 90 days.
Makes total sense, since the new hire probably had contact exclusively with the recruiting team. A little bit of extra hand holding can go a long way. But the HR department would probably need extra resources for this task?
The “recruiting owns the first 90 days” model is smart. Managers are already stretched, and onboarding falls through the cracks when it’s treated like one more task on their plate instead of a structured handoff. A-players notice disorganization immediately, and a sloppy start signals either incompetence or indifference, neither of which inspires loyalty.
I actually think the pairing piece is underrated too. New hires learning together accelerates culture absorption and creates built-in accountability without adding manager overhead.
One addition: Have the manager do a 30/60/90-day check-in that’s explicitly about integration, not performance. Ask “What’s unclear?” “Who haven’t you connected with yet?” “What’s missing?” It keeps the manager engaged without dumping logistics on them, and it catches gaps before they become retention problems.