Simple Street Homes: Employee Onboarding

When it came time to onboard a new employee, I remembered how scattered everything was when I first started. Onboarding documents here, sales training there, and a myriad of various other very important (but hard to find!) core parts of operational workflows that were strewn across videos, trainings, recordings, workflows, and other materials.

Taking inspiration from my own onboarding experience, I took the initiative to build what I wished I'd had from the beginning: a comprehensive onboarding platform. This platform was designed to effectively maintain long-term product knowledge, streamline access to essential operational workflows and sales training, and ultimately support the continued development of core skills for new team members from Day 1 and beyond.

Comprehensive
New Employee
Onboarding
Platform

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Core Focus

Provide an exhaustively comprehensive onboarding platform that rapidly trains new employees for the Acquisition Specialist Role

Challenge

As mentioned above, I knew that given the demanding nature of the role, any lapses in training would decrease the company's chances of successfully closing more deals - and as a consequence, make it harder to keep the lights on.

We know from Qualtrics' 2025 Employee Experience Trends report that roughly 1 in 7 onboarding experiences are negative. While onboarding is generally rated higher among most experiences in the employee journey, 1 in 7 is not insignificant.

Essentially, onboarding experiences can "make it or break it" for new employees.

Similar to my process of creating the Objection Handling document, the resources needed to successfully capture the entirety of what a new employee needed to have to enjoy a positive onboarding experience were hard to find, hidden in folders containing unrelated materials, and obscured behind various other training programs, login portals, and miscellaneous Google Drive folders.

Creating a comprehensive new employee onboarding program

required overcoming various hurdles:

Essential operational workflows, trainings, and documents weren't centralized in a core knowledge hub
Context between these resources to cement sales comprehension was incomplete
Complex workflows and SOPs lacked organized, step-by-step instructions

Action

As a result of having to navigate all these knowledge repositories and to locate what I needed in each step of the process, I was intimately familiar with the friction that arose when I didn't have either a) enough context about certain steps or b) a centralized way to easily switch between instructions for each step.

As you'll see below, I mapped out the process, context, and steps in as much detail as possible to better understand where the gaps were and how I could fill them for the next hire.

I filled those gaps with a straightforward, easy-to-understand checklist that included a Week 1 onboarding curriculum with day-by-day learning milestones, along with contextualized descriptions for how each resource worked relative to other resources in the sales process.

With all of this, my goal was the following:

Accelerate the ramp-up period and maintain product knowledge by integrating all training into one centralized, easy-to-access, module-based system
Reduce training load on admin by promoting self-guided onboarding schedule
Support the continued development of crucial skills
Foster trust in the company through empathy-first design and language

Result

I'm pleased to report that the new hire reported that our platform "definitely helped her get up to speed faster" and was "the best training" she'd ever experienced in an onboarding process.

Aside from the kind words, she closed a deal in her first week.

Platform Creation Process

Catalog all documents, folders, training materials, PDFs, recordings, etc.

Resources were scattered across folders, online training portals, Google Drives, etc.
After going through almost all of them, I had to make an accurate list of all the resources that were absolutely necessary to run our operations. Icons provided by FlatIcon.

Organize resources relative

to position in sales process

Big fan of visualization - using Miro, I was able to map out the sales process and all necessary and supporting documents. Having everything mapped out made time-to-answers as low as possible

Provide resources with knowledge

base and context

Grouping all these resources next to each other allowed for better comprehension of how they relate together in the sales process, not to mention easier overall access. I chose Notion for this, as it's fairly similar to Google Docs but provides a more wiki-like experience.

Ensure each resource and step in the process contained everything necessary for success

Specific pages had a "big picture" section, hyperlinked supporting documents,

and thorough explanations

Provide clear, actionable steps to ensure rapid ramp-up and solid comprehension.

Specific pages were clearly structured and hyperlinked with appropriate supporting documents.

Clearly outline core SOPs

for key steps in the sales process.

Every single one of these SOPs contained custom, step-by-step instructions written by me so that a new hire could jump right into my place with as little downtime as possible.

Record walk-through videos

for more complex workflows

If pictures are worth a thousand words, videos are worth a million. Some processes just need that kind of medium to clearly and effectively get the idea across.

At the end of the day, cutting corners in onboarding leads to more issues in training down the road, and providing video tutorials allowed us to make sure critical workflows received the attention they needed.

*this is a screenshot of the video

*this is a screenshot of the video

Core Takeaway

This project genuinely came from a place of empathy, understanding that knowledge gaps that can be filled should be filled, especially when somebody is arriving new to a position. It's easy to know what's documented, but as a new hire, you don't know what you don't know - and missing training or details hidden away as tribal knowledge only slows down a ramp-up period and can create frustration that arises later.

Everyone has different learning styles, but facilitating extreme ease of access to all learning materials enables anyone to get started quickly and up to speed.

The thought was the following: how can I make this the best possible onboarding experience for a new hire?

While I definitely have blind spots, I had peace of mind knowing that I had done my best to ensure that the new hire would have everything she needed to succeed. Setting others up for success just feels good.

Comprehensive New Employee Onboarding Platform