One of the most expensive hiring patterns I’ve seen starts with an assumption.
You hire an experienced person, give them a job description, introduce them to the team, and expect them to begin taking ownership.
For the first few weeks, it appears they’re getting involved and things are happening. They attend meetings. They learn the systems. They ask questions. They complete a few tasks.
Then the third or fourth month arrives, and something feels off.
The work you expected is not happening. The employee is busy, but the position is not producing the progress you imagined when you made the hire.
That is usually when frustration begins.
You look back at the job description and think, “It was right there. They knew they were responsible for this.”
This has happened to us more times than I care to admit. Eventually, I realized the job description was not the problem. The missing piece was the timeline.
Even though we defined the role, failing to outline what progress looked like meant expectations were never clearly set.
You may expect a new person to spend the first month learning the company, the second month implementing changes, and the third month producing meaningful results. The employee may believe the first three months are primarily for observation and integration.
Neither person necessarily has bad intentions. The problem is that neither communicated the expectations and what success in the job looks like. That gap eventually gets mislabeled as an employee accountability problem.
I used to think a 90-day plan for a new employee was a nice to have. Later, I would sometimes create one, but only after choosing a candidate. I now believe it should exist before the first interview.
Before opening a position, we should be able to explain why the position exists and what must be different 90 days after the person starts. That requires more than listing responsibilities. It means deciding what they need to learn, whom they need to meet, which systems they must understand, what ownership they should assume, and which meaningful outcomes they should produce.
Building that plan early changes the hiring process. Instead of evaluating candidates against a broad collection of duties, we can evaluate whether they are capable of doing the work the company needs on the timeline needed. We are no longer hiring an impressive résumé and hoping it translates into success. We are hiring someone against a defined operating need and timeline.
It also changes onboarding. The first few weeks should provide context to your new employee. They need time to understand the company, the people, and the way work moves through the company. Their initial workload should leave room to learn.
But learning cannot become an indefinite phase. By the end of the first month, the employee should understand enough to form a plan for their area of responsibility. During the second month, they should begin implementing that plan and taking on greater ownership. By the third month, there should be substantial work underway and visible outcomes emerging.
This structure does more than create urgency; it creates accountability. If an employee does not know what is expected, when it is expected, or how success will be evaluated, the company has not created the conditions for accountability. We cannot reasonably hold someone responsible for a standard that existed only in our head. Documenting and communicating that standard is squarely your responsibility.
Once expectations have been defined, discussed, understood, and properly supported, responsibility shifts. If the employee does not deliver, we are no longer dealing with an onboarding problem. We are dealing with an employee performance problem.
That distinction matters because growing companies cannot afford to take five or six months before discovering that a new hire isn't working out.
Accountability begins when you clarify what constitutes success, and by when. And that should be defined before the employee’s first day.
If you’ve had a new hire struggle because expectations were not clear enough, reply directly to [email protected] and tell me where the disconnect happened.
~ Erik
About
Erik J. Olson is the Founder and CEO of Proxa, where he builds and operates multiple marketing agencies focused on predictable, system-driven growth. He has scaled agencies across multiple markets by replacing fragmented execution with structured systems that drive consistent revenue. Erik is the author of Million Dollar Journey and writes The Business of Agency newsletter. He is building Proxa into a $100M platform with a planned private equity exit.