Ramp-up Time

There was a time when hiring someone was planned as if the extra output started the following month. Pagedeck raised the next quarter's revenue target to match two new salespeople. When the quarter closed, the two of them had delivered thirty percent of what was expected, and Sofia — who had been carrying the territory before — came in under her own usual numbers.

That second number explains the first. In their first month, new people don't produce output; they consume the time of everyone around them. Product walkthroughs get repeated, they sit in on customer calls, someone checks their outgoing emails. All of that time came out of the existing salesperson's week. The plan recorded two additions and none of that cost.

There was a loss running the other way too. By the second month an impression had set in that the new hires were behind, and nobody had written down what they were behind against. The judgment got made without anyone knowing whether the work in question takes two months or four.

Ramp-up time turns that stretch into a number so it can go into the plan. Measure between the day someone joins and the day they carry their own weight, then use the result for the next hiring plan and for fixing onboarding.

Count the days from the start date to the arrival date, then take the median across several people who joined into the same role.

The hard part isn't counting days; it's deciding what the arrival date is. Unless "carrying their own weight" has been converted into a number in advance, nobody can point to a specific day. So the bar gets written per role. For a salesperson it's the point of reaching 80 percent of the existing reps' average for two consecutive months. For an engineer it's shipping one feature from design to release alone. For a support specialist it's daily ticket volume reaching the team average.

Three steps.

1. Write the bar as a number. One sentence per role is enough. It's better written when the decision to open the role is made — write it after someone joins and the bar drifts to match the state of the person already in the seat.
2. Record a start date and an arrival date per person. The arrival date is the day the bar starts being held, not the first day it's touched. A strong month followed by a weak one means arrival hasn't happened.
3. Take the median across five or more recent hires. Averages get used less because one person swings them hard. For 88, 95, 102, 140 and 210 days, the median is 102 and the mean is 127. That single 210-day case pushed the mean up by 25 days.

A role with fewer than five people isn't ready for this number yet. The median of two describes those two people and nothing about the role.

There is nothing to compare an absolute value against. Each role has its own bar written down, so 100 days in sales and 100 days in engineering are not the same quantity. Broadly, sales tends to run three months, engineering two to three, and a manager taking on people around six. Comparing against other companies means little either, because their bar sentences say something different.

Two things are worth reading. The first is the spread inside one role. Five people clustered between 88 and 102 days means onboarding produces the same result regardless of who walks in. Five people spread from 88 to 210 usually means the difference came from the process rather than the people. Look at who got assigned accounts in week one and who waited three weeks, and at who had a senior colleague attached.

The second is the trend. A median of 120 days for last year's hires against 95 for this year's says that whatever changed in between actually worked. Three levers do most of the work: finishing the setup before the first day through preboarding, assigning someone for small questions through a buddy system, and writing down what each stretch of the first months is for. A buddy isn't there to teach the job — they're the designated person to ask.

This number doesn't get set as a target. "Let's get ramp-up down to 60 days" is most easily achieved by lowering the bar. Move it from 80 percent to 60 percent and the number drops that day while the real speed of settling in stays exactly where it was.

"Sales ramp is 100 days, so hiring in March doesn't put anything into the Q2 target."

Using the number as a premise for the headcount plan.

"Only one of the three recent hires took 180 days. We should find out whether that's the person or the process."

Refusing to treat a wide spread as an individual failing.

"This number means nothing until we agree what counts as arrival."

A request to settle the bar before starting to measure, since the arrival date cannot be recorded without it.

Pagedeck wrote its bar sentences after the two-salesperson episode. Arrival was defined as reaching 80 percent of the existing reps' monthly average for two consecutive months, and the five hires after that came in between 88 and 210 days.

The record for the 210-day case showed no assigned accounts for the first three weeks. While waiting for territory, that person read product documentation, and those three weeks pushed everything after them. Now two small accounts get assigned in week one.

The most common mistake is assuming a lower number is always better. A small value looks like onboarding working well. But this number moves freely depending on how the bar was written. Write a loose bar and the number falls while actual output over the first six months stays flat or gets worse. What needs shrinking is the waiting, not the figure, and whether the waiting shrank is verified by looking at what got assigned in the first three weeks.

The other misreading is treating ramp-up as a question of individual ability. When two people in the same seat come in at 88 and 210 days, the gap reads like a difference between them. In practice more than half of that gap is made of conditions the company controls: whether accounts existed on day one, whether a senior colleague was attached, when territory was handed over. Leave the assumption in place and the company declines to fix what it could fix, then repeats the result with the next hire.