Your Guide to Goal-Setting at a New Job

By Clifford Chi

With all the joy and excitement of landing a new job, you can feel just as much fear and anxiety. The same can go for the hiring manager.

Overcoming a new role’s learning curve and the desire to make a lasting impression on your employer can put a lot of pressure on you. What if you can’t adapt in time?

Fortunately, there’s a way to organize and prioritize your time and tasks, helping you seamlessly adapt to your new environment. It’s called a 30-60-90 day plan. And following it enables you to soak in as much information as possible, master your core job responsibilities and sets you up to make a lasting impact on your new team.

Think of a 30-60-90 day plan as a new employee’s North Star, keeping your sights set in the right direction and guiding you toward success. But before we show you how to write this plan, let’s go over what exactly it is and how it’ll enhance your performance during your (or your employee’s) first three months on the job.

A 30-60-90 day plan lays out a clear course of action for a new employee during the first 30, 60 and 90 days of their new job. By setting concrete goals and a vision for one’s abilities at each stage of the plan, you can make the transition into a new organization smooth and empowering.

There are two situations where you’d write a 30-60-90 day plan: during the final stages of an interview process and during the first week of the job itself. Here’s how each type can be executed:

30-60-90 Day Plan for Interview

Some hiring managers ask candidates to think about and explain their potential 30-60-90 day plan as a new hire. They want to see if they can organize their time, prioritize the tasks they’d likely take on and strategize an approach to the job description.

For a new hire, a well thought-out 30-60-90 day plan is a great way to help the hiring manager visualize you in the role and differentiate yourself from all other candidates.

Of course, it can be difficult to outline your goals for yourself before you accept a new job. So, how are you supposed to know what those goals are? Start with the job description. Normally, open job listings have separate sections for a job’s responsibilities and a job’s qualifications. Work to find commonalities in these two sections, and how you might turn them into goals for yourself staggered over the course of three months.

For example, if a job requires three years of experience in Google Analytics, and the responsibilities include tracking the company’s website performance every month, use these points to develop an action plan explaining how you’ll learn the company’s key performance metrics (first 30 days), strengthen the company’s performance in these metrics (next 30 days) and then lead the team toward a better Google Analytics strategy (last 30 days).

30-60-90 Day Plan for New Job

The second situation where you’d write a 30-60-90 day plan is during the first week of a new job. If you’re the hiring manager, this plan will allow you to learn how the new employee operates, address any of their concerns or preconceived notions about the role and ultimately help them succeed.

If you’re starting a new job, and are not asked to craft a 30-60-90 day plan during the first week of that job, it’s still a good idea to write one for yourself. A new job can feel like a completely foreign environment during the first few months, and having a plan in place can make it feel more like home.

Even though 90 days is the standard grace period for new employees to learn the ropes, it’s also the best time to make a great first impression.

The purpose of your plan is to help you transition into your new role, but it should also be a catalyst for your career development. Instead of just guiding you over your job’s learning curve, the goals outlined in your plan should push you to perform up to your potential and raise your bar for success at its every stage.

30-60-90 Day Plan for Managers [Template]

Almost all 30-60-90 day plans consist of a learning phase, a contributing phase and a leading phase — which we’ll go over in the example plan below. This includes plans that are designed to guide people in new management roles. What sets apart a manager’s plan from any other is their obligation to their direct reports and the decisions they’re trusted to make for the business.

If you’re accepting (or hiring for) a new manager role, consider any of the following goals and how to roll them out at a pace that sets you up for success.

Get to know your team’s strengths and weaknesses.

Recommended phase: First 30 days

Everyone is learning the ropes in their first month at a company. For managers, much of that learning happens by talking to the team. If you’re a new manager, grab some time with your direct reports and get to know their roles. What do they like about them? What are their biggest pain points? Making your team happy is a hard goal to measure, but it’s an important responsibility to take on as a manager. Your first step is to figure out how you’ll manage and coach your employees through their day-to-day work.

Improve the cost-effectiveness of your team’s budget.

Recommended phase: Final 30 days

Managers often have access to (and control over) the budget for their department’s investments — things like software, office supplies and new hires. After you spend the first couple of months learning what the team spends its money on, consider using the final 30 days of your plan to make suggestions for new investments or how to reallocate money where you think it needs to be. Is there a tool that can automate a task that’s taking your team forever to do manually? Draft a financial strategy that includes this tool in the following quarter’s budget.

Help a direct report acquire a new skill.

Recommended phase: Second 30 days

Even though you’re new to the company, you were hired for a reason: You’ve got skills. And you can bring these skills to the people you work with, particularly those people who report to you. After meeting with and learning about your new colleagues, you might use the second month of your onboarding plan to find skill gaps on your team that you can help fill. Do you have expert-level experience with HubSpot, and your new company just started using HubSpot Marketing Hub? Teach them how to do something in the platform they didn’t know before.

Draft a training strategy that can help guide your direct reports into new roles.

Recommended phase: Final 30 days

You won’t be expected to promote people in the first three months of your new job, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have learned enough about your team to decide who’s good at what and how to coach them to where they want to be. In the final 30 days of your 30-60-90 day plan, you might agree to a goal to develop a training strategy that outlines how to manage your direct reports, and ultimately how to guide them into new roles in the future.

How to Write a 30-60-90 Day Plan

No matter the level of the job for which a company is hiring, improving an employee’s skills requires concrete performance goals, so watch out for vagueness in the objectives you set for yourself. “Write a better blog post,” or “get better at brainstorming” are terrific ambitions, but they don’t give you a way to measure your progress in them. Set goals that are realistic, quantifiable and focused. You’ll know exactly how to achieve them and gauge your success.

To write challenging yet feasible performance goals, ask yourself the following questions:

What are my team’s goals?

Try to understand the purpose behind your team’s goals. It’ll give you more insight into why you and your team should achieve them, motivating you to work as hard as possible to meet those goals.

What will be my main priorities?

By connecting your personal responsibilities to your team’s goals, you’ll know exactly how to align your tasks with the needs of the team, which keeps you accountable and compels you to help your team achieve their goals.

How will I measure my progress?

Tracking your progress helps you gauge your performance and rate of improvement. To see how you’re doing, set up weekly meetings with your manager to ask them what they think of your work and track the improvement of your own performance metrics, like the growth of your blog posts’ average views or the amount of qualified leads your eBooks generate.

Reaching your performance goals isn’t the only path toward future success in your new role, though. You also need to study the ins and outs of your team and company, take initiative and develop relationships with coworkers — all things that a lot of new hires underestimate the importance of.

Consider setting the following types of goals during each stage of your 30-60-90 day plan:

Learning Goals – How will you absorb as much information as possible about your company, team and role?
Initiative Goals – What will you do to stand out?
Personal Goals – How will you integrate with your company and team?

Aiming to achieve these types of goals will help you hit the ground running in all the right areas of your job. And if you stick to your plan, you’ll notice you’ll be able to spend less time learning and more time executing.

30-60-90 Day Plan Template With Examples

Behold, your 30-60-90 day plan template. Click the image below to download your own copy.

So, how might you fill in the lines shown in the template above? Here’s an example:

30 Days

Primer

Many new hires are eager to impress, so they dive head-first into their work or try to make suggestions about their team’s process with limited experience in how their new team operates. But have patience.

Understanding your company’s vision and your team’s existing strategy is crucial for producing high-quality work and actually making an impact. If you don’t know the purpose behind your role or the optimal way to perform, you’ll risk missing the mark and your early efforts won’t pay off the way you expect them to.

It’s always better to over-prepare than under-prepare. And it’s okay to take time to learn the ropes — it pays huge dividends in the long run. In the first 30 days of your employment, your priority is to be a sponge and soak in as much information as possible. Once you do that, you can then try to improve more specific parts of your team’s work style.

Theme: Be a Sponge

Learning Goals

Study my company’s mission, vision and overarching strategy.
Read my company’s culture code to learn more about our company cultureand why we implement it.
Read the customer persona and target audience overview to truly understand who our customers are, their pain points and how our product and content can help them.
Meet with my team’s director to learn about how meeting our goals will help our business grow.
Read up on our team’s new SEO strategy, editorial process and traffic goals.
Learn how to use the SEO Insights Report to plan and structure blog posts.
Review my team’s pillar-cluster model overview and understand how to match posts to clusters.
Meet with my manager to learn more about their expectations.

Performance Goals

Complete new hire training and pass the test with a 90% or higher.
Be able to write 3 blog posts per week.

Initiative Goals

Run the Facebook Instant Article experiment that my manager recommended.

Personal Goals

Grab coffee with everyone on my team, so I can get to know them on a professional and personal level.

60 Days

Primer

By the end of your first 60 days, you should ramp up your workload, start overachieving and make a name for yourself on your team. To do this, start speaking up more at meetings. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas about improving your team’s processes. This shows you’re quickly conquering the learning curve and recognizing some flaws that your colleagues might’ve overlooked. You still have a fresh perspective on the company, so your insight is invaluable.

Theme: Be a Contributor

Learning Goals:

Learn how to optimize a new post from scratch based on both the SEO Insights Report and my own competitive research.
Read every other marketing team’s wiki page to learn about other marketing initiatives and how our entire department works together to grow our business.
Deep dive into my company’s product roadmap and strategy to fully grasp our mission and vision.

Performance Goals

Be able to write 5 blog posts per week.
Be down to one cycle of edits per post.
Understand how to edit a guest post — clean up at least one rough draft.

Initiative Goals

Share content strategy idea at my team’s monthly meeting and ask if I can spearhead the project to boost blog traffic.
Ask my manager if I can oversee Facebook messenger and Slack distribution strategy.

Personal Goals

Meet with my colleagues on other teams to learn about their marketing initiatives and develop relationships outside of my team.

90 Days

Primer

By the end of your first three months, you should have a firm grasp of your role, feel confident about your abilities and be on the cusp of making a breakthrough contribution to your team. Instead of reacting to problems that pop up at random, be proactive and spearhead a new initiative for your team.

You should also be cognizant of how you can collaborate with other teams to improve your own team’s processes. By taking on some new projects outside of your main role, you’ll start turning some heads and catch the attention of the department at large.

Theme: Be a Leader

Learning Goals

Do an analysis of my highest- and lowest-performing blog post up to date. How can I use this information to optimize new content so it performs better out of the gate?

Performance Goals

Be comfortable with writing five blog posts per week
Edit one guest post per week
Try to have 75% of my blog posts not require revisions.
Write at least one new post that generates over 10,000 views in one month.

Initiative Goals

Ask SEO team if they want to partner with product marketing team to brainstorm content topics related to our product road map.
Ask social media team if they’re willing to develop a relationship where we can share each other’s content.
Ask sales team what our customers’ pain points are, so we can write content that our target audience craves and help them close more qualified leads.

Personal Goals

Join the yoga club.

Learning the nuances of your new role in less than three months won’t be easy. But crafting a strong 30-60-90 day plan is your best bet for accelerating your development and adapting to your new work environment as quickly as possible.

Originally Posted on HubSpot

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