A new manager's first ninety days set the tone for their whole team. But most onboarding reaches only the new manager — a welcome email, a portal, an intro day sometime in the autumn. The person who recruited them, and who will coach them through those first weeks, is usually left with an expectation and the hope that they'll take it from there.
Onboarding really has two participants, and the one with the most influence on how it goes isn't the new manager — it's their hiring manager. Yet the hiring manager is the one designed for least: nothing sent, nothing recurring, a checklist on the intranet if they remember to look. Get their part right and a new manager lands well. Leave it to chance and the outcome swings on how well each hiring manager happens to improvise — same company, same program on paper, very different first months.
In Knowly you build this as an individual learning journey: each new manager moves through the same onboarding on their own start date, and their hiring manager gets a parallel track alongside it — timed to the same weeks, and starting before day one.
If you'd rather start with the mechanics, scheduling in an individual learning journey and anchor dates cover how one reusable setup gives each person their own timeline. This article is about the harder part: what to design, and for whom.
Design for both — starting with the hiring manager
The default sends the new manager a portal and the hiring manager a "please be supportive." Flip it. Treat the hiring manager as a second participant, not the recipient of a nudge — someone with their own sequence: prep before day one, weekly loop-ins while the new manager is finding their feet, a check-in partway through.
The general craft of a manager track — keeping them in the loop, letting them know the moment something happens, handing them a question to ask instead of a task to do — is its own topic, covered in how to involve managers so a learning journey sticks. Onboarding just raises the stakes: here the hiring manager isn't supporting a course on the side, they're onboarding a person. So the parallel track isn't a nice-to-have — it's half the design.
Begin before the first day
The things that quietly decide day one — the laptop, the accounts, a planned first 1:1, five people the new manager should meet in week one — only the hiring manager can do them, and only with lead time. So their track starts three to four weeks out, with a prep prompt that lands while the new manager is still on notice: here's what to gather, order, and plan now.
The new manager gets a warm pre-boarding note in the same window — not homework, just a welcome and an optional look at the company if they want it. In an individual journey you can schedule activities both before and after the anchor date, so "three weeks before the start date" is simply a negative offset from each person's first day. Individual learning journeys for pre-boarding goes deeper on staying in touch before day one.
Give the hiring manager a menu, not a mandate
Central onboarding can't cover the local part — this team, this role, the history, the inherited problem, the underperformer the previous manager never took on. Only the hiring manager can, and they already own it. What they're missing isn't ownership, it's structure: right now they do it when they remember, if they remember.
So offer a short menu of optional support they can pull in when they need it — a set of check-in prompts to structure their 1:1s, or a peer sprint the new manager can sign up for to meet others starting in the same seat. Think concierge, not catalogue: recommend the one or two that fit right now — "these usually help around week three" — rather than handing over a library. The peer groups do the work of the local part; the hiring manager just decides when to reach for them.
Close the loop so the next round is better
At the end, ask both sides a few short questions — how valuable was this, what should we keep, what should we cut, what one thing would you change. A short evaluation for the new manager and the hiring manager turns each cohort into input for the next one. The answers come back to you, and the design gets sharper one manager at a time, instead of aging quietly until someone rewrites it three years later.
That's the difference between an onboarding document and an onboarding that learns.
Set this up once and it keeps running. Connect the journey to a dynamic list and each new manager added to your directory starts their own sequence — with their hiring manager assigned automatically from your directory — without anyone in HR sending the Monday email by hand. The time you'd have spent running onboarding goes into designing it.