Onboarding a new regulatory hire well is a different job than telling them where the shared drive is. The real work is compressing months of context you built up without noticing into their first few weeks — without dumping all of it on day one, and without leaving them to guess the rest.
What to hand them in the first two weeks
Build them a handoff-style packet even though nobody is leaving: open items, the active decision log, reviewer and cross-functional contacts, and house conventions labeled by what kind they actually are. Most teams only write this kind of document when someone’s departing — the same discipline that makes a departure survivable is worth building for an arrival too, and it’s far less work to assemble when you’re not also finishing everything else on your way out the door.
How to calibrate them without a playbook
Give them a real task early and review their reasoning, not just what they hand back. Watching someone work an actual case surfaces where their judgment differs from yours much faster than describing your judgment to them in the abstract ever will — the same logic behind teaching a colleague what this work actually involves. And say out loud, in the moment, when something is a hard requirement versus a preference: a new hire who watches you skip a step once will assume it’s always skippable, and one who watches you add an extra check “just in case” will assume it’s mandatory everywhere else too.
Where this goes wrong
Building onboarding entirely out of shadowing
Watching you work teaches someone to anticipate you, not to reason independently. Give them something small to actually own within the first month.
Not separating rule from preference
The cost shows up months later, either as a real requirement quietly skipped somewhere else or a house habit defended as if it were regulation.
Saving feedback for the formal review
Waiting for a scheduled performance review to correct a pattern that showed up in week two costs both of you months of repetition that a five-minute conversation would have fixed.
None of this requires a formal program. It requires treating their first few weeks with the same seriousness you’d give a handoff — because that’s what it is, just running in the other direction.
Sources & further reading
- Regulatory Academy — The Case for Keeping a Regulatory Decision Log regulatoryacademy.com
- Regulatory Academy — How to Write a Submission Handoff Someone Else Can Use regulatoryacademy.com
- Regulatory Academy — Teaching a Colleague What Regulatory Affairs Does regulatoryacademy.com
- Regulatory Academy — Your First Regulatory Affairs Performance Review regulatoryacademy.com
This essay is provided for general educational purposes and reflects the regulatory landscape as of its publication date. It is not legal, regulatory, or career advice.
