The cursor blinks. It’s the only thing moving. The monitor has that low, almost imperceptible hum that you can feel in your teeth. You’re on Day 3. Your laptop, a machine that allegedly costs the company a significant amount of money, feels like a locked box you’ve been given without a key. You’ve attempted to reset password number 16 for a software platform whose name sounds like a mid-2000s text message-something like ‘Synrgy’ or ‘WrkFlo’. The reset email, it promises, is on its way. It has not arrived in 26 minutes.
Your assigned ‘buddy,’ a person named Dave who seemed friendly for the 6 minutes you spoke on Day 1, has a calendar that looks like a solid brick of red until next Tuesday. You’ve read the company’s ‘Our Values’ page 6 times. You can now recite the mission statement by heart, a meaningless catechism in a church you haven’t yet been allowed to enter. You are a ghost haunting a machine, pretending to be busy by resizing browser windows.
A Confession, Not a Failure
This is not a logistical failure. We love to call it that. We file it under ‘teething issues’ or ‘growing pains.’ We tell ourselves it’s the inevitable chaos of a fast-moving company. We say things like, “Just dive in, you’ll figure it out!” which is corporate shorthand for, “We have built a labyrinth and are now abandoning you within it.” This isn’t a faulty process. It’s a confession. A chaotic, indifferent onboarding is the most honest thing a company will ever tell you about itself. It’s a cultural flare, shot into the sky on your first day, that signals exactly how much you, as a human being, are valued. Which is to say: not much.
I used to think this was a benign sort of neglect. I even defended it. I’d argue that a bit of scrappiness was good for new hires, that it forced them to be resourceful. I said this, with a straight face, to people I was actively failing. I once onboarded a brilliant designer by sending her a list of 26 links, half of which were broken, and telling her to ‘get a feel for the brand.’ What I was really doing was outsourcing my failure of preparation to her, cloaking my disorganization in the noble language of ‘autonomy.’ It took her 6 months to find her footing, and another 6 to find a new job.
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I gave her a pile of chaos and was surprised when she built a bridge out of it and walked away.
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The Revelation of Foley Artistry
My perspective on this was permanently altered by a man named Antonio W.J., a foley artist. If you don’t know, foley artists are the people who create the sound effects for films in post-production. The crunch of snow under a boot, the slide of a leather glove, the specific click of a 1946 Zippo lighter. It is a profession of obsessive, beautiful intentionality. I was watching a documentary about his work. He was in a warehouse-like studio filled with what looked like junk: pits of gravel, stacks of old newspapers, 36 different kinds of doors mounted on frames. The director needed the sound of a character walking through a damp forest at night. Antonio didn’t just grab a branch. He spent hours testing things. He ended up snapping a stalk of celery close to the microphone for the sharp ‘crack’ of a twig, while his assistant slowly ground a bag of damp chamomile tea leaves under a leather boot for the wet, earthy compression.
It was a revelation. He was not just making noise. He was architecting a feeling. He was building a layer of reality that the audience would never consciously notice but would feel in their bones. He knew that the wrong sound, the accidental, chaotic noise, would shatter the illusion. The story would break. Trust would be lost.
Onboarding is Corporate Foley Artistry.
It is the subtle, critical sound design for an employee’s entire experience. Every broken link, every unanswered question, every piece of missing context is the wrong sound. It’s the celery snapping when you need the gentle rustle of silk. It’s a jarring noise that shatters the illusion the company is trying to sell-the illusion of competence, of community, of caring. The company values page says, “We value our people,” but the sound design of your first week says, “Your time is worthless and your presence is an inconvenience.” Which one do you think you’re going to believe?
Designed for Everything Else, But Us?
We design for everything else with such intention. We A/B test the color of a button for 6 weeks to see if it improves conversion by a fraction of a percent. We spend months architecting the perfect user flow in a product. We meticulously select Baby girl clothes and arrange them with care, understanding that a first environment matters immensely. Yet we take a human being-a person with experience, hopes, and a salary costing the company upwards of $476 a day-and throw them into a digital escape room with no clues and a ticking clock of anxiety. We give them a user experience that would get a product manager fired. And then we wonder why they aren’t engaged, why they leave after only 16 months.