The practice began as wartime necessity, when factories had to train strangers in hours.
Formal new-employee orientation programs emerged in American industry during World War II, when factories expanded rapidly and needed to integrate large numbers of inexperienced workers as quickly as possible. The War Manpower Commission promoted structured induction processes as part of the Training Within Industry program, which reached over 1.6 million supervisors between 1940 and 1945.1
Before the war, most workers learned their jobs informally, through observation and gradual immersion. The wartime labor shortage made that approach untenable.
By the 1960s, first-day orientation had become a fixture of American corporate life. The typical program included a tour of the facilities, introductions to key personnel, completion of employment paperwork, and a review of the employee handbook.2
Research on organizational socialization has consistently found that the first days and weeks of employment shape long-term retention. A 2015 study in the Academy of Management Journal found that structured onboarding programs reduced early turnover by as much as fifty percent compared to informal approaches.3
Technology companies in the twenty-first century expanded the concept from a single day to multi-week "onboarding" programs. Google's orientation for new engineers runs two weeks. Facebook (now Meta) at one point ran a six-week engineering bootcamp. The wartime half-day briefing had grown into an institution.