The 3H Method to Cutting Onboarding From 90 Days to 9

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“Training a remote hire takes forever.”

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this…

Honestly, if you run an agency, SaaS company, or service business, you’ve probably felt this too.

You don’t have three months to get someone up to speed.
You barely have three days.

You want A-players, not “potential.”
Not “maybe in 90 days.”
Actual ready-to-execute talent, and you need it yesterday.

Research shows the average employee takes 8–12 months to reach full productivity.

But that stat applies to average hires, not elite ones.

Elite hires don’t need heavy training. They need alignment.

A-players don’t need hand-holding.
They just need alignment.

That’s where the 3H Method comes in.
This is how we consistently take onboarding from 90 days… to 9 days.

Let’s break it down.

The First “H”: Headhunting

Hire People Who Practically Onboard Themselves

At a certain stage of growth, hiring for “value” (aka cheap labor) becomes the most expensive decision you can make.

Because junior hires don’t just cost salaries, they cost time, energy, attention, and lost momentum.

If you want onboarding to be fast, you need people who’ve already operated at the level you expect.
Not people you hope will rise to the occasion.

Headhunted talent ramps faster because they’ve already done the job at speed, at scale, and under pressure.

They come in with:

• Instincts for what matters and what doesn’t
  

• Pattern recognition from solving similar problems before
  

• Industry context that keeps you from re-explaining the basics
  

• Autonomy (the thing every founder claims they want but rarely hires for)

And this is exactly why Go Carpathian headhunts directly from the highest-performing environments:

• high-growth SaaS companies
  

• major agencies
  

• enterprise teams
  

• operationally excellent brands

Because when someone’s been trained in world-class systems, they plug into yours at lightning speed.

When you headhunt amazing talent, you’re not starting at zero.
You’re handing them the steering wheel.

And when the right person is in the seat?
They hit the ground running.

The Second “H”: Hubs

Eliminate Chaos in the Day-to-Day

Most teams have documentation… they just have it in 47 different locations.

Fourteen Notion pages.
Three Airtables.
Half a Google Drive from 2019.
A random spreadsheet someone named “final_FINAL_v7(2).xlsx.”

It’s chaos.

A Hub fixes that.

A Hub = one simple place where your team can see:

• what’s done
  

• what’s happening
  

• what needs to happen next

Our Marketing team sends out weekly newsletters (like this one) to 80,000+ people.
That means ideas, outlines, drafts, approvals, assets, analytics, all moving at once.

If we didn’t centralize everything, everyone would drown.

So we run the entire content operation from a single Hub with four tabs:

Tab 1: Topics & Pipeline

Ideas, statuses, links to outlines/drafts.

Tab 2: Performance Dashboard

Open rates and CTR.

Tab 3: Resources

Templates, brand guidelines, swipe files.

Tab 4: Sequences & Segments

Automation and audience insights.

Anyone new who joins the team (writer, strategist, freelancer) can open the Hub and instantly understand the whole machine.

Marketing, sales, operations…
Hubs work across every department because they remove one deadly onboarding question:

“Where do I find that?”

When everything’s easy to find, onboarding becomes easy to do, and ultimately it becomes a whole lot quicker too. 

The Third “H”: Handbooks

Document How You Win

Most companies “document” processes and then promptly lose them. SOPs are scattered in a dozen different places. Loom videos pile up. Nobody knows which version is real.

We use handbooks/playbooks instead.
Handbooks = trigger → response. One easy-to-find doc that answers, “If X happens, do Y.”

Examples:

• “New client signs” → run the onboarding flow
  

• “Team member leaves” → follow the offboarding checklist

Each playbook includes:

• step-by-step protocols (the how)
  

• preferences and heuristics (the why & how you make decisions)

Who writes the playbooks? 

Whoever does the work documents the work, the person closest to the task. That creates living documentation that’s accurate and actually used.

When your people write the playbooks, every hire can follow the same logic and make the same decisions. New hires don’t need to be spoon-fed; they get a clear reference that lets them self-onboard.

Simple playbook = fast onboarding.
100 different SOPs = 90 days wasted.

Training is only as hard as you make it…

Hiring internationally doesn’t slow you down.
Hiring wrong slows you down.

With our 3H method (Headhunting, Hubs and Handbooks), your new hire isn’t a 90-day onboarding project.

They’re an extension of your team by the end of week one.

If you want to meet A-players who can start contributing to your team this week, book a FREE 30-minute discovery call with our recruiting specialists.

We’ll show you candidates who are already operating at the level your team moves in just 2-3 days.

Until next time,