A new engineer joins on Monday. By Wednesday, their Slack DMs hold forty-three links — a wiki page, three Google Docs, a Notion board, two old threads, and a "you'll want to read this eventually" PDF. None of it is ordered. None of it is explained.
This is how most teams onboard: not with a plan, but with a pile. The information exists, but it arrives as noise instead of a sequence. The new hire is left to guess what matters first.
Below, you'll learn how to turn that pile into a deliberate reading list — one that ramps people up in a logical order, respects their pace, and actually gets finished. Let's fix the dumped-links problem for good.
Why the Slack-Link Dump Fails
The instinct to share everything comes from a good place. But research on information overload is unambiguous: more inputs don't produce more understanding. They produce paralysis.
When people face too many options or too much unstructured material, decision quality drops and stress rises — a pattern documented across decades of behavioral research and popularized in Barry Schwartz's work on the "paradox of choice" (The Paradox of Choice). A new hire staring at forty links experiences exactly this. Where do I start? What's still accurate? What's just noise?
There's a second failure mode: links shared in chat disappear. Slack messages scroll away within hours, and search rarely surfaces them when they're needed three weeks later. Studies of workplace communication consistently find that knowledge shared in transient channels is hard to retrieve and easy to lose.
The result is predictable. New hires either over-read low-priority material because nobody told them what to skip, or they quietly give up and learn by interrupting colleagues — which defeats the entire purpose of giving them documentation in the first place.
A reading list solves both problems. It imposes order, and it lives in a durable place instead of a chat scroll.
What a Good Onboarding Reading List Looks Like
A reading list isn't just a folder of documents. It's a sequence with intent. The best ones share a few traits.
It's ordered by week, not by topic
New hires don't need everything at once — they need the right thing at the right moment. Structure your list as a timeline: Week 1 covers culture, mission, and "how we work." Week 2 goes into the product and the codebase. Week 3 covers process, on-call, and team rituals.
This staged approach mirrors what onboarding research recommends. Strong onboarding programs are sequenced over weeks and months rather than crammed into a first-day firehose, and they measurably improve retention. Gallup's workplace research has found that only a small fraction of employees strongly agree their company onboarded them well, and that good onboarding is tied to higher engagement (Gallup: Onboarding).
It's tagged and filterable
Tags let a single list serve many roles. An engineer filters for engineering and week-1. A designer filters for design. A manager pulls the leadership track. One curated source, many paths through it.
Each item has a "why"
A bare link says "read this." A good list says "read this because it explains the decision behind our deployment process." Context turns reading from a chore into a map.
Build the List Once, Reuse It Forever
The hidden cost of bad onboarding is repetition. Every new hire triggers the same scramble — the same person digging up the same links from memory. Build the list once and that cost vanishes.
This is where a dedicated reading queue beats a shared doc. A tool like Omphalis lets a team lead save articles, internal docs, and external references into a structured, tagged queue that new hires work through at their own pace. Instead of pasting links into Slack, you save them once into a read-it-later app and hand over a single durable starting point.
Because Omphalis is built for consuming content others wrote, it fits onboarding naturally. New hires can highlight and annotate as they go, leaving questions inline for their manager. They can listen to long reference docs while commuting instead of forcing every item into screen time. And nothing scrolls away — the queue stays put until it's finished.
The pace-respecting part matters more than it sounds. People absorb material at different speeds, and a self-paced queue removes the pressure to keep up with a rigid schedule. The list waits patiently. The new hire checks items off as understanding lands, not as a calendar dictates.
For the team lead, the payoff compounds. Update one item — say, when the deployment process changes — and every future hire gets the corrected version automatically. The reading list becomes a living onboarding asset instead of a one-time email.
Keep the List Alive
A reading list is only as good as its freshness. The fastest way to lose trust is to send a new hire to a doc that's six months out of date.
Assign an owner
Documentation rots when it belongs to everyone and therefore no one. Give each onboarding track a named owner responsible for a quarterly review. Stale links get pruned; new essentials get added.
Collect feedback from recent hires
The people best positioned to improve your onboarding list are the ones who just finished it. Ask every new hire, at the 30-day mark, which items were essential and which were noise. Their annotations — the questions they left in the margins — are a free roadmap for what to clarify next.
Separate "must-read" from "nice-to-have"
Not everything deserves equal weight. Mark a small core of genuinely required reading, then let the rest be optional depth for the curious. This keeps the essential ramp short enough to actually complete, while still giving ambitious hires room to go deeper.
A focused core also fights the overload problem head-on. If everything is mandatory, nothing is prioritized — and you've recreated the Slack dump in a prettier folder.
Bring It All Together
Good onboarding isn't about handing people more information. It's about handing them the right information in the right order, then getting out of their way.
A structured, tagged reading list does exactly that. It replaces the chaotic link dump with a purposeful ramp, respects each hire's pace, and pays for itself every time someone new joins. Build it once, keep it fresh, and let it work for you.
If you want a durable home for that queue — one where new hires can save, tag, annotate, and even listen their way through the material at their own pace — Omphalis was built for exactly this kind of read-and-comprehend work.
Originally published on EchoLive.
