The Handover Gap Between Recruiting and the First Sprint

By the time someone signs, your company has learned a lot about them. Then day one arrives and their new manager knows their name, their job title and nothing else. That is the handover gap between recruiting and the first sprint, and it costs a new hire weeks of proving things the company already knew.

The fix is not a bigger process. It is a short note, written by the person who ran the hiring, handed to the manager before the start date.

What the hiring process already knows

Over four or five conversations, a hiring process collects things no onboarding checklist ever captures:

• What the person is genuinely good at, as opposed to what their CV claims
• What they said they wanted to learn
• The concerns the panel had and decided to accept
• How they work: alone, in pairs, early, late, in writing, out loud
• What they asked about, which tells you what they care about
• What they were promised, in words, during the offer conversation

That last one causes the most damage when it is lost. A recruiter says the role includes mentoring. Nobody writes it down. Six months later the person leaves because the job was not what they were told, and the manager never knew there was a promise to keep.

What should carry over

Not everything. The point is a page, not a file.

Carry these four:

1. Strengths the panel agreed on. Two or three lines. This lets a manager give real work in week one instead of a warm up task, and it is the first honest entry in a skills matrix that does not rot.

2. The accepted gaps. Every hire has them. Writing them down turns them into a training plan rather than a surprise in month three.

3. Promises made. Anything said about scope, progression, travel, hours or learning during the offer stage.

4. How they said they like to work. Useful for the first month, then it stops mattering because you know them.

That is the handover. It fits on one page and takes fifteen minutes to write while the interviews are still fresh.

What should not carry over

Some of what hiring collects should stop at the offer.

Interview scores, rejected salary numbers, references, notes about other candidates, and anything a person shared in confidence about their previous employer. None of it helps a manager plan work, and all of it can quietly shape how someone is treated before they have done anything.

Rules differ by country and by contract, so check your own obligations on what hiring records can be retained and shared. The safe default is that a manager receives a summary written for the purpose, not access to the hiring file.

Who owns the move

This is where it usually breaks. Recruiting thinks the handover happened because the offer was accepted. The manager thinks HR will send something. Nobody owns it, so nothing moves.

Give it to one person and give it a deadline: the person who ran the hiring writes the note, and it lands with the manager before the start date, not on it. Before matters. A manager who reads it the night before can plan a first week. A manager who reads it at 9am on day one is already improvising, and improvising is how two teams end up booking the same person for the same week.

The handover note is written by whoever ran the hiring, delivered before the start date, and covers strengths, accepted gaps, promises made and working preferences. One page. No scores, no salary history.

Why it fails even when someone owns it

The usual reason is that the two systems do not talk. Hiring lives in one tool, projects live in another, and moving anything between them means retyping it. So it does not get retyped.

When project management and HR sit on one set of records, this stops being a transfer and starts being a field. The manager opens the person's record and the context is already there, alongside their team, their start date and where their leave approvals sit. SicherOne is built this way for that reason: the records are shared, so information does not have to survive a copy and paste to reach the person who needs it.

If your tools are separate, the note still works. It just needs a human to carry it, which means it needs a name and a date attached.

A test for whether yours is working

Ask a manager, in week two, what they knew about their new hire before the person walked in. If the answer is the job title and a start date, the gap is open.

Ask the new hire the same thing in month two: what did you have to explain twice? Every repeated explanation is a line that should have been on the handover note.

Two questions, both cheap, and they tell you more about your onboarding than any survey.