A leadership team tells me it typically takes three to six months for a new employee to become fully effective.
By the time they’ve learned the systems, understood the organization, built relationships, and gained confidence in their role, months have passed.
The natural questions follow.
Can we improve onboarding?
Do we need better documentation?
Should managers spend more time with new hires?
Those are all reasonable questions.
They just aren’t where I’d begin.
At this point, I’d have questions.
Quite a few of them.
Is this true of every new hire, or only certain roles?
What allows some people to become effective more quickly than others?
What knowledge takes the longest to acquire?
Where does that knowledge currently live?
In documentation?
In experienced employees?
Or simply in years of accumulated experience?
Because the goal isn’t merely to help new employees learn faster.
It’s to understand how the organization develops capability.
Then another question would begin to interest me.
When a team needs another senior engineer, why is hiring externally the first assumption?
Perhaps it’s the right decision.
But perhaps it isn’t.
How close are your strongest mid-level engineers to stepping into that role?
Could they grow into it with intentional mentoring?
If so, what would that mean for the rest of the organization?
Perhaps a junior engineer could begin taking on greater responsibility.
Perhaps someone in another department has quietly been teaching themselves to code for years and is ready for an opportunity.
Perhaps the organization already possesses more capability than it realizes.
Those possibilities are easy to miss when we only look outside the organization for growth.
This isn’t an argument against hiring.
Sometimes bringing in new people is exactly the right decision.
Fresh perspectives matter.
New experiences matter.
But hiring is only one way an organization grows.
Developing the people who already understand your culture, customers, and business is another.
Often, it’s faster.
Often, it’s less expensive.
And it sends a powerful signal that growth is something the organization invests in, not simply recruits.
Only after understanding how capability develops inside the organization would I begin suggesting experiments.
Perhaps mentorship becomes more intentional.
Perhaps internal career pathways become easier to see.
Perhaps documentation supports not only onboarding, but internal mobility.
Perhaps leaders begin looking for overlooked strengths before opening a new requisition.
The goal isn’t simply to fill positions more quickly.
It’s to help the organization become better at recognizing and developing the talent it already has.
Every organization is unique.
The situation you’ve just read isn’t a template.
It’s an example of how I approach complexity.
My goal isn’t to arrive with predetermined answers.
It’s to help your organization better understand itself before deciding what comes next.