Most Onboarding Problems Are Documentation Problems

Every broken onboarding I've inherited had the same root cause: the process lived in someone's head, not in a document.

The manager assumed the last hire's tribal knowledge would just transfer. It didn't.

The fix isn't a longer welcome packet.

It's writing down the boring, specific stuff (who approves what, where the templates live, what "done" looks like for the first two weeks) before the next hire needs it, not while they're sitting there confused on day three.

Documentation isn't overhead.

It's the difference between onboarding that scales past one lucky hire and onboarding that quietly breaks every time someone new joins.