S7 E3: Orientation & Onboarding

Podcast April 22, 2026

Transcript:

Pete Wright
Welcome to Human Solutions, Simplifying HR for people who love HR from AIMHR Solutions. I’m Pete Wright. Here’s a question worth sitting with before we get into it. When is the last time a new hire walked into your organization and really landed? Not just completed their paperwork, not just got their badge and their laptop, but actually felt like they understood where they were, why it mattered they were there, and where they fit in. Because if you’re like many employers, you’re probably conflating two things that are doing very different jobs: orientation and onboarding. They’re not the same thing, and treating them like they are is quietly, maybe, costing your people. Today, Kyle Pardo and Annette Dupree from AIMHR Solutions are here to untangle them — what each one is actually supposed to do, where AI can genuinely help and where it absolutely cannot, and how a thoughtful, intentional new hire experience can be the difference between a great long-term hire and a frustrating early exit. Kyle, Annette, welcome. I’m so glad to be having this conversation. I was thinking as I was on my way into the office this morning that my first onboarding was with the VP who had hired me and it consisted of a drive-thru at a Carl’s Jr. for Diet Coke while she kind of loosely explained what my job was going to be on her way to the airport to leave me alone on my first day. I have a feeling my onboarding experience is not going to be one of the case examples of great onboardings you’re going to talk about today.

Kyle Pardo
No. Sounds like it might be typical, though, and I think that’s what happens in a lot of companies.

Pete Wright
That’s kind of my fear. And there’s Annette nodding her head already. First, let’s go ahead and disabuse all assumptions for those who have, like me, maybe considered onboarding and orientation as all just kind of a big muddy mess of the first couple of weeks of your job — you’ll sort it out and then eventually people will give you something to do. Let’s sort out what these functions really are. Annette, do you want to kick us off? Get us on the right track.

Annette Dupree
Absolutely. So the best way to start thinking about this is that orientation is really day one, maybe day two, of an onboarding process. Orientation is short-term, it’s very administrative, it’s very transactional, where onboarding is more of an integration effort and a development process. So let me back up to day one or two. What’s going to be going on? Filling out forms, doing the payroll paperwork, setting up benefits, getting you enrolled, acknowledging things like handbooks and specific policies — maybe a whole handbook or maybe specific policies like harassment — maybe giving you some swag, getting you set up with IT, a tour of the building, maybe some basic introductions. But again, it’s all transactional. It’s all just to get you on board.

And these days a lot of this is done by the new employee at home before they even start. They’re given a digital package through an HRIS system, or maybe just a pile of documents in a PDF sent over to get signed. So that’s the orienting part.

But onboarding is a much longer-term integration and development process. So thinking 30, 60, 90 days — maybe even more if you have a very high-level position and you need to check in at six months and one year on more things that are happening or changing in the organization, particularly if people aren’t privy to the leadership meetings and finding out what’s going on.

So this is where the employee is going to learn about culture, systems, how they go about making decisions in your organization, what the performance expectations are going to be, and how they’re going to get feedback. Is it a standard review process or do you meet in supervision every other week? Also, it’s meeting the team members as well as stakeholders, really spending some time with them — spending 15 to 30 minutes for them to introduce themselves and get to know you. You also want to know about company tools, how things work, and so on.

Now I like the idea of introducing a buddy. You can use that in any way — you can call it job shadowing. But nothing beats having a confidant who either works with you or does the same job and helps walk you through it and give you the ins and outs. So onboarding is not paperwork. It’s connecting people to the organization.

Pete Wright
Okay. So what I gather is there is a point where you’ll know when orientation has ended and onboarding has begun. It’s more than just a vibe check, right?

Annette Dupree
I hope. Yeah.

Pete Wright
So let’s dig in briefly, before we turn our attention to where some of the tools can help us with our onboarding work. I didn’t hear you say Diet Coke a single time as you were talking about that. For businesses that have never had a formal onboarding program, what is the role of informal onboarding, and is it a bad thing? What does that look like for most organizations — the Diet Coke organizations?

Annette Dupree
I think those subtle gaps in that process, they compound over time. And those are the ones that affect retention, affect satisfaction, and affect the way the person is doing in the job, how they feel about the organization. I don’t think there’s a quickie version of it. I think it needs plans, checklists. It needs involvement both from HR and from the hiring team.

Pete Wright
It seems to beg for organizations that don’t typically have permanent HR fixtures to express some interest in entry-level HR onboarding training to have skills at the management level. Is that something that you recommend — to let people know: here’s how you onboard an employee to make them a fixture in your organization?

Annette Dupree
Absolutely. They can reach out to AIM in a variety of different ways and even use our website as a resource to get ideas. Call the helpline, of course, and get ideas. And of course there’s always Google to help you figure out how to put together an onboarding program that fits your culture and makes sense. And I know toward the end of the program we’re going to talk a little bit about the differences in organizations and how they handle it. But your creativity can go wild. You could even have a Jeopardy situation where they learn about the organization through interaction, connecting with people, not staring at a pile of paperwork.

Pete Wright
I want to make sure we turn to the tools that are directly impacting our organizations right now. And Kyle, we’ve talked before about AI in HR, AI everywhere. What is your perspective right now on AI’s role in the onboarding process — orientation and onboarding? What fits, what doesn’t? Where should people start?

Kyle Pardo
I mean, first of all, I think everyone should be thinking about AI in this process, particularly in orientation. Thinking about what information you want to convey during the orientation process. And as Annette spoke about, you typically have checklists. You want to make sure you go through all of them. Have AI create the checklist for you. That’s an easy task to have AI assist with to get that off your plate.

But then when you think about all the other areas you want to communicate, really start thinking about how can you make it interactive? How can you make it fun? Sometimes people dread the orientation day. It’s like, oh, I’m going to go sit in a room. They’re lucky if they go to Carl’s Jr. and get a soda. They’re going to be locked into a conference room for six hours with the paperwork.

Annette Dupree
Falling asleep.

Kyle Pardo
So there are a lot of ways I think AI can help in creating videos, creating infographics — taking your orientation information and plugging it into AI to help you with some of those things. There are organizations — I don’t know if any of you have used NotebookLM — you can take a PDF and upload it and it will create a podcast for you. Not quite as good as this podcast, but it will automate it.

And so you think about sitting in a room where you might have to read through a PDF or several PDFs to get the information — make it a little more interesting. Have your employees listen to it. AI can assist you with that. Or if there are safety protocols, can you create an infographic using Canva or another AI tool that will help make it look a little more interesting rather than just a long list? So I definitely think the orientation day information — a lot of that can be done through AI.

When we start to talk about onboarding, the longer-term integration, AI is going to come into that a little bit. Perhaps you have a chatbot or something that might help answer questions. Maybe you could create a video using AI that’s a tour, or if you’re in a large organization, use AI to help create videos introducing you to people you’re not going to see on a daily basis.

But when I think about onboarding, onboarding is really about engagement — really getting that employee to understand the company culture. And I don’t think you can AI your way into that engagement. That’s going to take the human touch. That’s going to take the personal interactions, the buddy systems that Annette talked about, the meetings with the team, getting to know the clients. A lot of that is actually still going to need the human piece to it.

Pete Wright
I want to ask about the sort of orientation risk of AI. You brought up NotebookLM, which is by all accounts a stunning tool to be able to give to a new employee. Not just giving them one PDF of practices, but create a notebook with all the company documentation in it and say: if you ever have a question, just go ask the notebook. Type it in, it’ll find the answer. It’s fantastic. But what happens when the first taste of the organization comes from this faceless computer, this fake made-up podcast? I’m interested in the risks of what happens when the first connection a new hire has to our organizational structure comes from AI on day one.

Kyle Pardo
Yeah, I think that’s where the human piece has to be woven in. I think there are games that you could create, team bonding activities that you could create using AI, but then have the employees go out and do a search through the company to meet certain people. So I think it’s using a combination of those tools because, again, nobody wants to sit and read something all day or sit and just listen or look at a computer and watch a video.

Even if you’re working remotely, I think even that first orientation day — split up your day. You’re going to have an eleven o’clock chat with this person. Send them a gift card to your local coffee shop. Say, hey, go out, grab a coffee, and then come back and have a phone call or a video chat with somebody. Something that just keeps that human touch because I agree with you, Pete. If it’s all AI or all just independent learning in orientation or in onboarding, I think you’re going to get a different culture for your company.

Pete Wright
Do we have an example? We’ve just used the theoretical NotebookLM — here’s a thing you could try. But do you have an example, either of you, of one of these AI tools in practice that people are using right now in an innovative, clever way — not just filling out files, but helping to get people in and onboarded quickly?

Kyle Pardo
Yeah, a couple of different tools that you could use. Gemini and Loom are two that people are using for videos, and Canva also is being used to create videos. So those could be welcome videos, they could be meet-your-team videos. We’ve seen organizations that are using animated GIFs — doing this through ChatGPT. Think about how a lot of colleges are doing this now: when you get accepted you get an email with your name and confetti coming out of the message. So a little more exciting than the traditional offer letter. Using AI to help create something like that.

I think if people are comfortable using ChatGPT, it’s a great place to start. Say, here’s what our onboarding process looks like, give me recommendations, tell me the tools to use to automate or to rethink how we’re doing these processes. That might be the safe place for people to start. They’re familiar with it. And thinking about Canva, Loom, Gemini, NotebookLM — I think a lot of those can help.

Pete Wright
But check me on this. As I make this statement, I’m wondering just how accurate it is. Our effort with orientation is to make it as efficient and high-touch as we possibly can so that we can move to the human-centered onboarding as quickly as we can.

Kyle Pardo
I think that’s fair.

Annette Dupree
I’d say still, yeah.

Kyle Pardo
Yeah.

Pete Wright
I want to say that we have a comment. Normally I save these to the end, but we have a comment in the chat which I think really addresses this. These days, onboarding documents are already filled out before they start. So the first day can be the tour of the company, the lunch with the team, understanding the mission and vision, which sounds very much like we’re making that transition to the onboarding part very quickly.

Kyle Pardo
Yeah, a lot of companies now use applicant tracking systems. So from the time you send in your resume, you automatically go into the applicant tracking system. When you’re hired, that information gets converted over to the payroll system.

Pete Wright
You’ve DocuSigned, yeah.

Kyle Pardo
So as soon as you’re ready, you get a link to that system. DocuSign, you get the handbook right there, you get your benefits signups right there. I think where it’s not all completed before you start is that people still have questions. People still aren’t sure what health insurance option to pick. And so maybe that requires an in-person meeting on your first orientation day to help you navigate those types of questions, or use the AI for it. But a lot of it can be done early on through those payroll systems.

Pete Wright
For the back half of our conversation, I’d like to turn toward where onboarding can go bad and give some examples, and allow you to share some examples of onboarding cultures that really do work. Let’s start with the sour — how onboarding can go bad. Give us a sense of the biggest onboarding mistakes that organizations make when bringing new people on. Annette, I’ll let you start.

Annette Dupree
Yeah, I think without a doubt, the top mistake is overloading new hires with too much training and information. So you sit in a room — gosh, some people do five days. They’re doing CPR, they’re doing first aid, they’re doing other regulatory requirements. They’re in a room for five days. Now it’s nice that they get to spend time with other new hires and maybe meet some people, but they’re either overwhelmed or they’re going to be asking you a lot of questions. Either way, the learning becomes inefficient because it’s not working.

And even a morning, even a day, can derail it. There could be technology and access problems, no team interaction, no information about their job, their company policies, performance expectations. You often hear from managers, well, they didn’t have any questions. And that’s probably right — they don’t have them until about two weeks, three weeks, a month out. Then some of the things they heard made sense to them and now they have questions.

So giving that orientation and then sending them out into the world and not following up with them is really a disservice, because much of the information you gave them didn’t sink in — maybe one or two key points.

Kyle Pardo
I think one of the worst things that can happen on your first day is not feeling like people are expecting you and welcoming you. Not having a desk ready or a place to sit, not having a computer ready, not having a phone ready. People think, oh, just sit here for a couple of minutes till we’re ready for you. It’s a big move when you start a new job, whether it’s your first job or your tenth. There’s some anticipation and nervousness and excitement. And I think you want to show up and know that people were ready for you and wanting you to be there. So I think that’s a huge problem and that doesn’t happen on the first day.

But then when I think about onboarding, a lot of people think that orientation falls within HR, which it typically does, but onboarding really is the whole company. Onboarding is the manager, it’s the teammates, it’s the leadership team. And so everybody needs to be part of that onboarding process for it to be successful — not just relying on HR to take that.

Pete Wright
So everything you’ve explained, especially about onboarding being the responsibility of the whole company, implies that when people come in, managers and peers have time to invest in the new employee. But one of the things we hear all the time is the manager’s too busy — too busy with their day-to-day operational stuff to devote enough time to sitting down, talking, introducing, doing those things. So how do you build an onboarding program that survives the busy manager and the busy team?

Kyle Pardo
I think that’s a great question because we do hear that a lot. But if that manager really thinks about wanting their employee to be successful, giving up that time now is going to be short money, short time. Like, all right, I’m going to really schedule this time to make sure I sit down, I follow up, I check in, I do introductions, all of that. Because not doing that now is really going to cost the department later when the person says, I didn’t know where to go, I didn’t know who to ask about that question, nobody ever told me, I never saw an org chart or had an introduction. So it’s going to be challenging for managers for sure — they’re likely very busy — but it’s really important that they schedule that time.

Annette Dupree
Particularly if they’re concerned about retention. The company’s already made its first impression with the new employee, right? It started from the first phone call for the phone screen, through the interview process, gathering all these first impressions. Do I want to work here or not? And now you’ve hired them, they’re excited, they come on board. We need to meet them with that excitement. And maybe it would change some of the first impressions that might not have been so favorable. But if they come in, they’re welcomed, they’re glad to be there, they want to be heard — it just goes miles toward getting the person immersed in the culture. And that’s really important. They want that, particularly the younger people. Of course everybody’s a kid who’s under forty to me, but

Pete Wright
You are forgiven.

Annette Dupree
Anyway, sorry about that.

Pete Wright
Yeah.

Annette Dupree
But they want that engagement. They want to feel like — again, like Kyle said — we want you here. We’re so happy you’re here to do this work with us.

Pete Wright
Do we have data on when early turnover typically happens? Like, is it week two? Is it month two? And how does good onboarding impact that?

Annette Dupree
Well, I’ve had a few people — I look at their workspace and their backpack’s gone at lunchtime. So it can happen that early. But I think probably if things aren’t remedied or things are happening over these thirty, sixty, ninety, hundred and twenty days, and you don’t keep engaging the person and find out how they’re feeling and what they’re doing, you are going to lose them. And what a waste. What a waste of time and money to invest that much in a person and then not take the opportunity to grab them.

Pete Wright
As we turn our attention to the other side — when onboarding looks like a robust and vibrant cultural entity — I would love to open the floor to both of you to share your experience of organizations that do it really, really, really well.

Kyle Pardo
One organization I’ll share is Chick-fil-A. A lot of people know Chick-fil-A. They ingrain in their employees what to say. Everyone always says “my pleasure.” It is part of their onboarding, part of their process. And where you can see that in an organization is if you go from one location to the next and see the same practice happening over and over again. You know that that was part of their onboarding and their process to make sure everybody knew what is expected of them.

Annette Dupree
It’s very evident when you go to Chick-fil-A — the service, the respect, the positivity. Like you said, you can tell that was how they were trained and oriented. It’s very evident.

Pete Wright
You, Annette, went through Disney University. Now there’s a culture.

Annette Dupree
Yeah, no kidding. I had the great pleasure of going through the orientation program along with others. It was called Disney University, and I was going to look up if they still have it. But what Disney does is they go about everything with intensive immersion and everything is tied to the bigger picture. So though you may be getting a job as Goofy — and Goofy can’t talk and Goofy has to behave in all these certain ways — they act out things with you. They didn’t tell me anything. They demonstrated every part of their orientation through activities.

One of the things that still sticks with me to this day — and this was over 25 years ago — the philosophy is that people will remember an experience more than they will just a presentation, listening to someone talk. So one of the things they did, the key thing as they called it, is when you would respond in the program and answer a question, the trainer would hand you a key. Now of course all of us were dying to know what was going to happen with whoever had the most keys. It was a great prize at the end, but it just made it fun and made you want to answer to get another key. That’s just a great example of the type of things that they do.

And they have a lot of rules — the size of your earrings, the color of your lipstick, nail polish, jewelry. There are a lot of rules. But they don’t just tell you no earrings, no this, no that. They explain it and build it into the culture of why Disney requires those things. It’s amazing.

Pete Wright
It’s fascinating, and a great reminder of just how much we as adults coming into onboarding for a new job can so easily be triggered to have that same sense of childlike wonder. You start throwing me keys that I can win by participating, I will be twelve years old for you again.

Annette Dupree
Right. Exactly.

Pete Wright
Right?

Kyle Pardo
And that’s what they’re looking for in a culture like Disney — people who want to act like they’re twelve years old, who enjoy the experience and can feel it and all of that. That’s what they want to create. So they’re starting out from day one.

Pete Wright
Well, Disney University collected a lot of keys because they’re now called — and they’re still around — the Disney Institute.

Annette Dupree
Oh, we’ve sophisticated ourselves.

Pete Wright
Yes. Very simply, somebody got a treasure. Somebody wants something big.

Annette Dupree
Very nice. Yeah.

Annette Dupree
I was in the aviation world, so it was very customer service focused at that point for me.

Pete Wright
We are talking about Chick-fil-A and Disney. What does it look like when an organization doesn’t have that sort of mega reputational structure that it brings with it? I mean, a lot of the organizations we work with are small to medium sized and don’t have the decades of cultural credibility that Disney has. What does it look like to have a strong onboarding culture at one of these organizations?

Annette Dupree
Well, I think you need to make a plan. Get creative, take full accountability for it, get together, do project management, put all your pieces in place, and start one. Why not? Start it now — no time better than the present.

Kyle Pardo
I think just to reiterate what you said — you have to have a plan. If you don’t have a plan, it’s easier to miss something. And the plan starts with making sure every new employee knows the company mission, knows who your competitors are, knows what your culture allows and doesn’t allow. But you’ve got to start somewhere and have that list, if you will, just to make sure you’re going to cover everything that’s important to you as an organization.

Pete Wright
We have just two minutes as we get toward wrapping up. I would love it if you could rattle off a hot list — the red flags that you hear for people who call the hotline. People listening might be thinking, I wonder if this is an onboarding problem. What do you hear that you think could be handled with a more robust onboarding option? Can you give me two or three?

Annette Dupree
What comes to mind right away is — and Kyle will laugh at this probably — they’re just not the person we interviewed. They showed up and now they’re a different person. And could you have noticed that during onboarding? Were you asking behavioral-based questions so you got to know who they were? But that’s very common. Also, just the lack of attention, where an employee finally comes in and says, okay, I know you’re mad at me, but you really haven’t welcomed me, or you haven’t immersed me with other teams, and I don’t feel supported. That all comes from day one, when they joined you.

Kyle Pardo
Yeah, and I’ll add to that — we hear things like they’re just not catching on. And so thinking back, okay

Annette Dupree
Did you throw it?

Kyle Pardo
Right. So what are they not catching on to? Is it a process, a procedure, a customer, something? But going back to — how do we need to train better to make sure that by day thirty, sixty, ninety, people are hitting those benchmarks and catching on? So it becomes not just about the employee when that happens.

Pete Wright
I was just going to say that. It sounds like — and sure, maybe there are cases where you interviewed somebody and they were fantastic and then they’re not the same person you interviewed — but they might be saying, you know what, this is not the same company that interviewed me, now that they’re actually in the seat.

Kyle Pardo
Yeah.

Annette Dupree
Great point, Pete. Absolutely.

Pete Wright
I love this conversation. I feel like we could talk a lot more. I definitely want more culture stories, especially where they go wrong, because we need a Real Housewives version of culture gone bad, onboarding gone bad. This has been a great conversation. Thank you both so much. Do we have a specific training that you want to pitch? Something we offer in the catalog that we want to share with people?

Kyle Pardo
Yeah, I’ll just wrap up with what we talked about and say — I think HR should have fun with it. We want orientation to be interactive and something people remember five, ten years later, like Annette remembering her story from 25 years later. We want people to remember it. We can help you through that process. We can share some best practices that companies have shared with us over the years and help you put together what that system looks like. We can also help with employee engagement surveys. So if you want to follow up with your employees after they’ve been with you, whether it’s six months or six years, and you want to find out how they’re doing, how they’re feeling about the company, let us know and we can help you through that process.

Pete Wright
It’s never too late to ask that question.

Kyle Pardo
Never too late.

Pete Wright
Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us. Don’t forget, AIM members can reach the HR helpline at 800-470-6277, or email helpline@aimnet.org for inquiries Monday through Friday from 8:30 to 5 Eastern time. Email requests will be responded to within 24 hours. As always, you can find links and notes about this show at aimsolutions.com. You can listen to the show right there on the website. You can subscribe to the show as a podcast in Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Pocket Casts, anywhere podcasts are served. On behalf of Kyle Pardo and Annette Dupree, I’m Pete Wright, and we will see you next month right here on Human Solutions.