This interview is with Nick Anisimov, Founder, FirstHR.
Nick, as the Founder of FirstHR, how would you introduce yourself and the specific onboarding problems you’re solving for small businesses?
I’m Nick Anisimov, founder of FirstHR.
I’ve been building companies since I was 15, and across every one of them, I kept running into the same problem: onboarding new hires was always chaotic. There was no system, no structure, just a folder of documents and hope that someone would show the new person where things are.
The tools that existed were basically glorified checklists. They could tell you what to do, but they could not actually do it for you. Small businesses with 5 to 50 employees do not have HR departments. The founder or office manager handles everything, and they do not have time to manually track paperwork, chase signatures, or build training plans from scratch.
FirstHR solves that. We provide small businesses with a complete onboarding system that includes e-signatures, training modules, task workflows, and an AI assistant that generates onboarding plans based on job descriptions. Setup takes about ten minutes, and no HR experience is needed. The whole point is that if you can use a basic document editor, you can run proper onboarding.
What lived experience pushed you to start FirstHR and shaped your philosophy on small‑business onboarding?
I have started four companies since 2011: a marketing agency, a VR entertainment company, a VR training platform, and now FirstHR. Every single one of them had the same problem with new hires.
The worst experience was at my VR company. We were growing fast, hiring people every month, and every time someone new joined, it was the same mess. There was no clear process, no documentation ready, and nobody assigned to walk them through the first week. People would show up on day one and just sit there waiting for someone to tell them what to do. We lost good people in the first 90 days simply because their start was so disorganized that they assumed the whole company ran that way.
I looked for tools to fix this, and everything I found was either built for enterprises with 500 employees and a full HR team or was a simple checklist that did not actually solve anything. Nothing existed for a company like mine: a small team, no HR person, but real onboarding needs.
That gap is what pushed me to build FirstHR. We spend weeks finding the right person, invest time and money into recruiting them, and then lose them because their first month was a mess. The candidate leaves frustrated, and we are back to square one with a hole in the team and a wasted hiring budget. All of that is because nobody set up a proper onboarding process. That is the problem I wanted to fix.
Starting with day zero, what single pre‑boarding step has delivered the biggest impact for your new hires?
Before their first day, I have an honest conversation with the new hire about what actually matters to them. Not logistics, not paperwork. I ask them what they are worried about, what they need to feel comfortable, what has gone wrong at previous jobs, and what drives them crazy in a work environment.
Most companies send a welcome email and a stack of documents. That does nothing for the person’s confidence when walking in on day one. But when you take 30 minutes to understand their concerns and expectations before they start, two things happen. First, you can actually prepare for them instead of guessing. Second, the person shows up on day one already feeling like someone cares about how this goes.
It is the simplest thing you can do, and it costs nothing. Yet almost nobody does it because everyone is too busy setting up laptops and filling out compliance forms.
You begin leadership onboarding with an open conversation—how do you translate that approach for entry‑level or hourly hires?
There is no difference. I have the same conversation with every new hire, regardless of their role or level. An entry-level employee has the same fears and uncertainties on day one as a senior leader. They just might not feel comfortable voicing them unless you ask directly.
If anything, this conversation matters more for junior and hourly hires. These individuals often have less work experience and do not know what to expect. They are less likely to speak up on their own if something is wrong. Giving them that space before they even start tells them it is safe to be honest here.
The format stays the same: what are you worried about, what do you need, and what has not worked for you before? The answers vary depending on the person, but the approach does not change. Good onboarding is not a perk for senior hires; it is how you treat everyone.
In your 90‑day onboarding flow, which weekly milestone is non‑negotiable for setting a new hire up for success?
The one-on-one at the end of the first week is non-negotiable. Everything else can shift, but that conversation cannot be skipped.
By day five, the new hire has had enough time to form real impressions. They have seen how the team works, tried the tools, sat through meetings, and maybe hit their first roadblock. That is when you sit down and ask: how is it going, what questions do you have, what problems have come up, and how does reality compare to what you expected?
That last part is the most important. The gap between what someone expected and what they actually experienced in their first week tells you exactly where your onboarding is broken. If they expected hands-on training and got a shared drive full of documents, you know what to fix. If they expected a structured week and got chaos, you catch it before it turns into a resignation.
This one conversation sets the tone for the entire 90 days. It tells the new hire that their experience matters, and it gives you real data to adjust the rest of their onboarding while there is still time.
Following your “automate the repetitive” rule, which onboarding task did you automate that returned the most manager time?
Creating the onboarding flow itself is the task that used to consume the most manager time and is now almost entirely automated.
Before FirstHR, building an onboarding plan for a new hire meant starting from scratch every time. Managers had to figure out which documents were needed, what training to assign, which tasks to schedule, and who to introduce the new hire to. A manager could easily spend hours putting this together, and often, something was missed anyway.
In FirstHR, our AI Wizard lets you build the entire onboarding flow on one screen. You input the role, and it generates a complete plan: documents, training steps, tasks, and timelines. You review it, adjust whatever needs adjusting, and launch it. The new hire gets a ready-made flow showing exactly what to do and when.
That single automation gave managers back more time than anything else we built. Instead of spending hours assembling a process from scratch for every hire, they now spend just a few minutes reviewing and customizing one that is already 90 percent done.
In your screening process, which question best predicts whether a candidate will thrive in onboarding at a small company?
I do not think there is one magic question that predicts everything. But the closest I have found is asking candidates about their worst first week at a previous job: what happened, how they handled it, and what they wish had been different.
The answer tells you a lot. You see how they react to chaos, whether they take initiative when things are unclear, and what their expectations look like. Someone who says “nobody told me what to do, so I just figured it out” is a very different hire from someone who says “nobody told me what to do, so I sat there waiting.”
In a small company, onboarding is never going to be as polished as at a corporation with a dedicated HR team. You need people who can handle some ambiguity without shutting down. This question surfaces that quality faster than anything else I have tried.
When a new hire wobbles around weeks two to four, what intervention has most reliably turned performance and morale around?
An honest one-on-one conversation. No system or framework replaces it.
When someone starts struggling in weeks two to four, the reason could be anything. Maybe the onboarding flow has gaps you did not notice. Maybe they are confused about expectations but are too uncomfortable to say so. Perhaps the role is genuinely not the right fit.
You will not know which one it is until you ask. So, I sit down with them and have a direct conversation: what is going on, where are you stuck, and what do you need that you are not getting?
After that conversation, there are really only three outcomes:
- You identify a fixable problem in your onboarding process and adjust it.
- You realize the person just needs a reset and some clearer direction to get back on track.
- You both recognize that this is not working and it is better to part ways now than to drag it out for three more months.
All three are good outcomes. The worst thing you can do is ignore the wobble and hope it resolves on its own.
If a 10‑person company asked for a lightweight onboarding toolkit to ship this week, what would you include in version one?
Keep it dead simple. For a 10-person company shipping this week, here is what version one looks like.
First, a day-one checklist: equipment ready, accounts and access set up, team introductions scheduled. Nothing should be figured out on the fly when the person walks in.
Second, a single document with clear expectations for the first 30 days. Not a 20-page handbook. One page that answers: what are you supposed to learn, what are you supposed to do, and how will we know it went well.
Third, assign a buddy. One person on the team is the go-to for any question, no matter how small. This takes the pressure off the founder and gives the new hire someone safe to ask, “Where is the printer?” without feeling stupid.
Fourth, a weekly one-on-one with their manager for the first month. Fifteen minutes, no agenda needed.
Fifth, all paperwork in one place with e-signatures: NDA, contract, and policies.
That is your minimum viable onboarding.
Or you can set up FirstHR in about ten minutes and have all of this ready to go out of the box.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Just one thing.
About 20 percent of employee turnover happens within the first 45 days, and 88 percent of companies do not onboard well, according to Gallup. These numbers are worse for small businesses, where there is often no onboarding process at all.
Small businesses lose good people not because of salary or competition. They lose them because the first month was chaotic, and the new hire assumed the rest of the job would be the same.
Onboarding does not have to be complicated; it just has to exist.
Even a basic structure beats nothing, and most small businesses are still running on nothing.