The prep work before an offshore hire starts is mostly access
What you need in place before an offshore hire starts is access, not training. Logins, file locations, a named person who answers questions, and one piece of work with a defined finish. Firms spend the week before a start date building an orientation deck and the week after the start date discovering the new hire cannot open the CRM. The deck was the easy part, which is why it got done first.
Why access, not training, decides the first two weeks
A trained person without access produces nothing. An untrained person with access produces something imperfect you can correct, and correction is faster than instruction because it happens against real work. That asymmetry is the whole argument for front-loading credentials over curriculum.
The list is short enough to finish in an afternoon. Ad accounts, analytics, the call tracking platform, the CMS, the design files, the shared drive, the practice management system if the role touches matters, and the phone or chat tool everyone actually uses rather than the one in the employee handbook. Each of those has an owner inside the firm, and each owner is one Slack message away from being the reason week one stalls. Someone has to chase them before the start date, and that someone is not the new hire, who has no standing to chase anybody and has been told to make a good impression.
Two-factor authentication is where this quietly breaks. A tool secured to a partner's cell phone cannot be delegated by good intentions. Sort the authentication path before the start date or accept that your marketing hire will spend their first Tuesday texting a partner in a deposition.
A trained person without access produces nothing. An untrained person with access produces something imperfect you can correct.
The four things a firm owes a new offshore hire on day one
Access is the floor. Four other things determine whether the hire is contributing by the end of the month, and none of them require a document longer than a page.
- A named person who answers questions, with a stated response window. Not a team, not a group inbox. A person, and a second person for when the first is in trial.
- One piece of real work with a defined finish. A landing page for a single practice area, an audit of one campaign, a cleanup of intake dispositions for the last thirty days. Something with an edge you can both see.
- A place where finished work lands and past work lives. A new hire who cannot see what already exists will rebuild it, badly, and you will pay for the rebuild twice.
- Clarity on what they may decide alone. A specialist waiting for approval on every ad copy change is a specialist you are paying to wait.
The supervision question sits underneath all four, and it is not optional for legal support roles. A lawyer's responsibility for work performed by a non-lawyer assistant does not change because the assistant is in Cebu, and the model rules carry supervision obligations for non-lawyer assistants regardless of where the person sits. That is a structure to design before the start date, not a policy to write after an incident.
None of this is a training plan. That is the point: firms build the training plan because it feels like preparation, and it is the one item on the list a competent hire can partly build for you. Access, a person, a task, and a boundary. The deck can wait.
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