You spent weeks sourcing, interviewing, and closing a great IT hire. They accepted your offer, served their notice period, and showed up on Day 1 excited to make an impact. Then what? In too many organisations, the answer is a day of HR paperwork, a laptop that is not ready, and a vague instruction to “talk to your manager about what to work on.” Three months later, that expensive hire is disengaged, underperforming, or already interviewing elsewhere. Great onboarding prevents this. Here is how to do it right for IT professionals.
Why Onboarding Matters More Than You Think
The data is unambiguous. According to a 2024 Gallup study, employees who rate their onboarding experience as exceptional are 2.6 times more likely to be satisfied with their job and 70% less likely to leave within the first year. Yet only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organisation does a great job of onboarding.
For IT professionals specifically, the stakes are higher. Tech talent has options. A bad first month does not just create dissatisfaction — it triggers the job search instinct. The candidate who accepted your offer is still receiving messages from recruiters. If their first-week experience signals disorganisation, broken processes, or a lack of investment in their success, they will respond to those messages.
The cost of early attrition is staggering: 6-9 months of the departing employee’s salary when you account for lost productivity, recruitment costs, and the time their replacement takes to become productive. For a senior engineer at 25 LPA, that is 12-19 lakhs lost.
Before Day 1: Pre-boarding
Great onboarding starts before the employee walks through the door (or logs in remotely). The period between offer acceptance and start date is critical.
What to do during pre-boarding:
- Laptop and access provisioning: Order hardware, set up email, create accounts for all tools (IDE, repo, CI/CD, communication channels, project management). Nothing signals “we are not ready for you” louder than a missing laptop on Day 1.
- Welcome package: Send a welcome email from the hiring manager (not just HR) explaining what the first week will look like and who to contact for questions.
- Pre-reading materials: Share company culture documentation, team org chart, architecture overview, and coding standards. Let them arrive informed rather than overwhelmed.
- Buddy assignment: Pair them with an experienced team member who will be their go-to person for questions, context, and social integration.
The 30-60-90 Day Plan
A structured 30-60-90 day plan gives new hires clear expectations and measurable milestones. It reduces the anxiety of “am I doing enough?” and gives managers a framework for early feedback.
Days 1-30: Learn and Absorb
Goal: Understand the product, team, processes, and codebase.
Week 1 priorities:
- Complete all administrative onboarding (HR, IT, compliance)
- Meet with the hiring manager for a detailed role expectations conversation
- Shadow team members in key meetings (standups, planning, design reviews)
- Set up the local development environment and make a first trivial commit (fix a typo, update a README)
- Meet 1-on-1 with every team member for 30 minutes
Weeks 2-4 priorities:
- Complete a structured codebase walkthrough with a senior engineer
- Attend all team ceremonies and understand the sprint cycle
- Pick up 2-3 well-scoped starter tickets (bug fixes or small features)
- Document everything that confuses them — this is invaluable feedback for improving documentation
- Weekly 1-on-1 with the manager focused on learning, not delivery
30-day milestone: The new hire can navigate the codebase, understands the deployment process, has shipped at least one small change to production, and can articulate the product’s value proposition.
Days 31-60: Contribute and Build Confidence
Goal: Transition from learning to contributing meaningfully.
Key activities:
- Take ownership of medium-complexity features or projects
- Participate actively in design discussions and code reviews
- Begin reviewing other team members’ code (this accelerates codebase understanding)
- Identify one process improvement and propose it to the team
- Attend cross-team meetings to understand adjacent systems
60-day milestone: The new hire is contributing to sprint commitments, providing meaningful code review feedback, and showing increasing independence in their work.
Days 61-90: Own and Lead
Goal: Operate at full productivity and begin making a broader impact.
Key activities:
- Lead the implementation of a significant feature or project
- Mentor newer team members (if applicable)
- Present a technical topic at a team knowledge-sharing session
- Provide feedback on the onboarding process to help improve it for future hires
- Career development conversation with the manager
90-day milestone: The new hire is operating at the expected level for their role, has established productive working relationships across the team, and is contributing to the team’s technical direction.
The Buddy System: Your Secret Weapon
The buddy system is the highest-ROI onboarding practice, yet most companies skip it. A buddy is not the manager, not the tech lead — it is a peer-level colleague who serves as the new hire’s first point of contact for everything from “where do I find the VPN instructions?” to “who should I talk to about this architectural decision?”
What makes a good buddy:
- Experienced enough to answer questions but junior enough to remember what being new feels like
- Genuinely interested in helping (do not assign reluctant buddies)
- Available and responsive during the first month
- Willing to initiate check-ins rather than waiting to be asked
Buddy responsibilities:
- Daily 15-minute check-in during the first two weeks (can be informal — a quick Slack message works)
- Take them to lunch (virtual or in-person) in the first week
- Introduce them to key people outside the immediate team
- Flag any signs of frustration or confusion to the manager early
Tech Stack Orientation for IT Hires
IT professionals join your company to write code, build systems, and solve technical problems. Generic corporate onboarding that ignores the technical dimension is a missed opportunity.
A structured tech stack orientation should cover:
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Architecture overview (Day 2-3): A 2-hour session with a senior engineer walking through the system architecture, key services, data flows, and deployment infrastructure. Record this session for future hires.
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Local development setup (Day 1-2): Provide step-by-step documentation for setting up the development environment. If this takes longer than half a day, your setup process needs simplification.
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Codebase tour (Week 1): Walk through the most critical code paths — not every file, but the ones that handle core business logic, common patterns, and areas that frequently need modification.
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Deployment and monitoring (Week 2): How to deploy to staging and production. How to read logs. How to interpret alerts. How to roll back a bad deployment.
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Testing philosophy (Week 2-3): What types of tests does the team write? What is the expected coverage? How do the CI/CD quality gates work?
Cultural Integration: The Often-Forgotten Dimension
Technical competence without cultural integration leads to an engineer who writes good code but cannot collaborate effectively. Cultural onboarding is especially important when:
- The hire is joining from a very different company culture (startup to enterprise, or vice versa)
- The team is distributed across geographies and time zones
- The company has strong opinions about engineering practices, communication norms, or decision-making processes
Cultural integration matters — we cover this topic in depth in our piece on why cultural fit matters more than technical skills.
Cultural integration practices:
- Explicit documentation of team norms: How do we communicate? How do we disagree? How do we make decisions?
- Cross-functional introductions: Connect the new hire with product managers, designers, and business stakeholders — not just other engineers
- Include them in social events from Day 1 (team lunches, game nights, off-sites)
- Share the company’s history and values through stories, not slide decks
Measuring Onboarding Effectiveness
What gets measured gets improved. Track these metrics:
- Time to first commit: How long until the new hire ships their first change to production?
- 30-day satisfaction survey: How does the new hire rate their onboarding experience?
- 60-day manager assessment: Is the new hire on track to meet 90-day milestones?
- 6-month retention rate: Are onboarded hires staying?
- Buddy feedback: What gaps in the process did the buddy observe?
At StakTeck, onboarding effectiveness is part of our permanent staffing service quality commitment. We work with clients to ensure that the talent we place is set up for success from Day 1, because a great hire with bad onboarding is a waste of everyone’s investment.
The Key Takeaway
Onboarding is not an HR process — it is a business-critical investment. The companies that retain their best IT hires treat the first 90 days with the same rigour they apply to product launches: structured plans, clear milestones, dedicated support, and continuous feedback. The cost of getting it wrong — in attrition, lost productivity, and damaged team morale — far exceeds the cost of doing it right.
Related Reading
- 5 Retention Strategies That Actually Work for IT Teams — Great onboarding is just the beginning; these strategies keep people engaged beyond 90 days
- Why Cultural Fit Matters More Than Technical Skills — Onboarding for culture, not just process, starts with hiring for alignment
