- Onboarding
- SOPs
What is offshore staff onboarding actually testing you on?
Week one is an audit. The hire is not the one being tested.
Two weeks of onboarding tells a firm more about its own processes than about the person it hired. The hire is being taught. The firm is being measured. Every question a new paralegal asks in week one marks a place where the answer lived in somebody's head instead of in a document. Firms read those questions as ramp-up. They are findings.
What is offshore staff onboarding really testing?
Onboarding tests the written record, and a firm has exactly as much of one as it wrote down. Firms build it as a calendar: two days of tool access, a call with the practice manager, a folder of past matters, then live work. That is not onboarding. That is a tour. A tour works when the person following it already knows the building. That is the one condition a remote hire does not have. Nothing on the calendar says what a correct output looks like. Nothing on it says who decides.
Week one puts the firm's process on the record, and most of that process was never written down. The hire asks where the review criteria live. Somebody says they will check. A partner answers from memory two hours later, and the answer runs longer than anybody expected. That is a finding, not a hiccup. A task management system is the floor, and a firm sitting below it reads every one of those gaps as a slow start. Same symptom. Two causes. Only one of them is the hire.
Week one is the audit.
Why does a good hire still stall in week three?
A firm watching a hire stall in week three is right to look at the hire. Candidates are the most visible variable in the arrangement. The difference between two people at the same rate, on the same tools, is real. Screening for it is rational. The first two weeks ran clean, so the person looks like the thing that changed. But a strong hire and a weak one fail the same way when nobody wrote the criteria down. By week three the calendar has run out.
The work is arriving now. Nothing in onboarding covered the document that matches no sample in the folder. So the hire escalates, and the firm calls it hand-holding. It is not hand-holding. It is the process asking for a sentence nobody has written yet. Every escalation in month one is a line of missing documentation with a person attached to it.
Supervision of non-lawyer assistants is written into the ABA Model Rules, and the obligation belongs to the lawyer rather than to whoever runs payroll. So somebody at the firm reads the output every week, whatever the arrangement is called. That reading is the constraint. Onboarding is when a firm finds out how much of it exists. The answer is usually less than the plan assumed. The screening was fine. The floor was not.
Onboard the firm.
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