The Onboarding That Teaches You Nothing (And What It Really Means)
The fluorescent hum of the office lights is a dull throb behind my eyes. It’s Day 3. I’ve just clicked ‘finish’ on the 45th mandatory compliance module, feeling less informed and more… processed. My head is a swirling vortex of GDPR regulations and acceptable use policies, but my actual role, my team, the real work? Still a phantom. My email inbox sits at 235 unread messages, none of which seem to contain the golden ticket to productivity. It’s like being handed the keys to a spaceship, then immediately being told you need to spend the next three days watching videos about the legal liabilities of space travel, all while the ship’s actual launch sequence remains a mystery.
This isn’t just inconvenient; it’s an early, profound betrayal.
Onboarding, in its current corporate incarnation, isn’t designed to make you effective. It’s not even primarily about making you *feel* welcome. If we’re being honest, it’s a legally compliant, scalable, and impersonal process engineered to minimize risk for the company, not maximize success for you. And that’s the brutal truth: how a company onboards you is the most honest statement it will ever make about its culture. It tells you, in no uncertain terms, whether you’re a person to be invested in, or merely a resource to be provisioned.
The Human Element
I remember Sofia C., our corporate trainer. She had an air of perpetually trying to connect the dots in an unsystematic












