The First Monday

A new associate starts. Sharp CV, good references, expensive to hire.

By 10am they have a laptop and a login. By Wednesday they've shadowed two calls and read a deck. By Friday they're asking the person next to them how the firm actually names its files, where the last sector map lives, and what a first-pass screen is supposed to look like here.

Nobody can point them to an answer. Because the answer isn't written anywhere. It's distributed across four people's heads and eleven years of email.

What Osmosis Actually Costs

The polite word for this is "learning on the job." The accurate word is drag.

Run the maths. A new associate on a six-figure package who takes six months to reach full output has cost you roughly half a year of salary for partial production. Multiply by every joiner. No line item captures it, but the P&L pays it every time.

The second cost is worse. Every question the new joiner can't look up gets asked upward. How do we structure an IC memo? Who owns the CRM stages? What did we conclude on this sector last year? Each answer comes out of a senior person's day. That's the same senior time you hired the associate to protect.

So the hire that was meant to create capacity spends six months consuming it.

Why It Happens

Not because your people won't help. Because the firm's way of working exists only as habit.

Deal teams run on unwritten convention: how a screen gets built, when a deal moves stages, what a good first call note looks like. Everyone senior knows it cold, which is exactly why nobody writes it down. The knowledge feels obvious to the people who hold it.

It isn't obvious. It's undocumented. And undocumented knowledge has to be transmitted person-to-person, one interruption at a time, every time someone new arrives. Then it walks out the door again when they leave.

What Good Looks Like

You don't need an HR programme. You need three documents that already half-exist in people's heads.

A ways-of-working file. One page per core workflow: how deals enter the pipeline, how a screen is built, how an IC memo is structured, where research gets stored. Write each one the day someone next performs the task. Four weeks, and you've covered most of it.

A first-two-weeks plan. Day by day: what to read, who to meet, which past deals to walk through, and one real task with a defined output by Friday of week one. A plan turns a new joiner from an observer into a contributor in days, not months.

A named owner for onboarding. Not HR. Someone on the deal team who answers for how fast the new person becomes useful. What has an owner gets done. What doesn't gets absorbed by whoever is closest, which is usually the most senior person in the room.

None of this needs software. It needs a decision that the firm's operating knowledge is an asset, not folklore.

The Question Worth Asking

Think about the last person who joined your team. How much of what they now know arrived through a document, and how much through interrupting someone expensive?

If the honest answer is "mostly interruptions," you're not running an onboarding process. You're running an apprenticeship, at institutional prices.

Write it down once. Every hire after that is faster.