You only get one first day: Don’t overlook onboarding in retention

The gaming affiliate industry is a world of performance metrics, traffic volumes and conversion rates. We're good at measuring outcomes. What we're not always so good at is slowing down long enough to ask: what actually keeps great people around?

Onboarding. That's where the answer starts, while retention is where it lives. Both are where most companies quietly drop the ball.

First impression sticks

Think about the last time you started somewhere new. The first week either told you "you made the right call" or planted a quiet seed of doubt that grows fast in a high-pressure environment like iGaming, where talented people have options and aren't shy about exercising them.

The numbers are sobering. According to Gallup, only 12% of employees strongly agree their organisation does a great job of onboarding new hires. And yet, research from the Brandon Hall Group found that organisations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. Those aren't soft metrics. That's your P&L.

Getting onboarding right the first time is always easier than doing repairs later. First impressions compound. Set the right tone early, and you're building on solid ground for the full lifespan of that person's tenure. Set the wrong tone, and you're spending the next six months chasing trust you should have earned in week one.

Systemised onboarding

The first move is building a uniform onboarding process. One that every single person walks through, regardless of their seniority, team or location. In gaming organisations where team members are often spread across time zones, consistency is what creates equity.

That means documented processes, clear expectations, structured introductions to key players and a warm, genuine welcome that signals “we thought about your arrival before you got here”.

Systematic doesn't mean robotic either. The process is the container where you pour the culture into.

Culture isn't a slide deck 

Culture is what your organisation cares about and how things actually get done. Not the values on the website just for display, but the visibility in how feedback gets delivered, how decisions get made and how people treat each other when a campaign tanks or a partner relationship gets messy.

Effective onboarding educates people about those values and shows them what they look like in action, thereby managing their expectations so nothing comes as a shock when these things actually happen. If one of your values is transparency, your new joiner should see it demonstrated in their first week, in a team meeting, in a conversation with their manager and in how difficult topics get handled. Values without behaviour to back them up are just wallpaper.

Take the time to spell out your communication standards. How does feedback work here? What does a good one-on-one look like? How do we handle conflict? These aren't soft questions. They're the operating system. When people know the rules of engagement, they can focus on doing their best work instead of trying to decode the culture by osmosis.

Let them be a human, not just a hire

Here's something a lot of gaming organisations often get backwards: they onboard for function before they onboard for belonging.

Yes, your new performance marketing manager needs to understand the tech stack. Yes, your new account executive needs to know the product inside out. But they also need to feel like they belong somewhere. Those aren't competing priorities.

Create genuine opportunities for your new joiner to be seen as a person, not just a role. That might look like a team lunch, a casual intro call with someone outside their direct team, a manager asking "what do you love doing outside of work?" and actually listening to the answer. Nobody should be forced to disclose anything personal. But when you build a warm, psychologically safe environment, people naturally bring more of themselves. And people who bring more of themselves tend to stay longer and perform better.

Introduce them to all the key players beyond their direct team – the broader ecosystem of people they'll work alongside, collaborate with and rely on. In a fast-moving affiliate business where relationships are currency, that internal network is a foundational asset.

Give them space to ask questions and actually mean it 

New joiners often have the most useful questions. They see things that long-tenured employees stopped noticing, but only if they feel safe enough to ask.

Smart organisations build a structured space for questions. They have managers who check in frequently, especially in the first 90 days, and who conduct not a formal performance review, but a human conversation: How are you finding it? What's confusing? What's landing well? What do you need more of?

That kind of intentional listening signals something important: We're paying attention. You matter here. That's the seed of camaraderie, and it grows into something that meaningfully reduces turnover.

Retention as an ongoing practice

Successful onboarding builds the foundation. What you do next determines how long someone stays and how much they grow.

Retention requires ongoing investment, starting with clarity. Every person on your team should be able to tell you what success in their role looks like, how their work connects to the company's mission, and what their path forward looks like. Vague expectations and invisible career trajectories are two of the fastest ways to lose solid talent to a competitor who offers more certainty.

One-on-one meetings with managers should include career trajectory conversations at least once per quarter. They should not just be status updates and transactional reporting meetings. Ask questions like: What are you working toward? What skills do you want to develop? Where do you see yourself in two years? These conversations signal that you're invested in their future, not just their current output. 

Development opportunities matter enormously here. Coaching and training should never be just perks; they're performance infrastructures. Research consistently shows that employees who receive coaching report higher engagement, reduced stress and stronger collaborative skills. They're better at giving and receiving feedback, more confident in their decision-making and more likely to develop into the kind of leaders an organisation can promote rather than having to hire from outside.

The data from Saroca's work with Rubrik, a global cybersecurity company operating across 16 offices in North America, EMEA and APAC, makes this case concretely. Through a structured leadership development programme combining group learning, one-on-one coaching, and an internal sponsorship model, Rubrik saw leadership confidence rise by 40%, leadership tool adoption increase by 125%, and participants’ ability to deliver feedback improve by 35%. Employees in the programme were 45% more likely to be promoted and 49% more likely to improve their performance ratings. Eighteen-month follow-up data showed sustained career mobility and higher retention among programme alumni. These aren't soft outcomes; they’re why Rubrik has continued to invest in this programme since 2023 and is still running. These are the results of treating development as a strategic investment rather than a nice-to-have.

For iGaming and affiliate businesses specifically, the ROI on this kind of investment is significant. This is a relationship-driven industry. Your best people, your top affiliate managers, your senior SEO talent, your high-performing BD leads, your AI innovators, can all walk out the door fast if they want to. The cost of replacing them (recruitment, lost relationships, productivity gaps, lost institutional knowledge) is far higher than the cost of investing in keeping them.

The bottom line

Build a systemised, human-centred onboarding experience, and you set the foundation for belonging. Maintain momentum with clear role expectations, visible career pathways, human connection and meaningful development investment. Listen to what your people need. Give them the tools and support to succeed. Create an environment where the organisation functions as one organism, looking out for itself by looking out for each other.

Trust is currency in this industry. Start investing in it on day one.