We have a point of contact, a manager, and a mentor. That's three layers that we add to the onboarding journey, people, not policies, to make the context of our organization much more relatable.
Vanessa Gilardi
Onboarding a new hire now often happens over video. Survey data puts just over half of US employees with remote-capable jobs in hybrid arrangements as of the spring of 2026, with another quarter working remotely full time. Through new technology, information moves easily across a spread-out team, but relationships take more deliberate effort.
In BambooHR’s Redesigning Work: AI’s Performance Review report, 35% of workers say knowledge transfer at their organization now runs primarily through AI tools rather than people. Another 48% say cross-generational mentorship has become harder as junior workers lean on AI instead of senior colleagues. A growing company usually needs both at once: information a new hire can easily find, and the right people to explain what it means.
Vanessa Gilardi is the People Director at Sonar, a company headquartered in Austin, Texas that enables organizations to ship agentic code with confidence. She joined about a year ago, after serving as Global Head of People at MoonPay and head of people and L&D at Blockchain.com. Earlier she ran HR for wealth and asset management at RBC, and today, she advises MeetKairos and mentors in the Women in Tech Global Program. Gilardi has built people functions at companies ranging from startups to global organizations across more than 25 countries, giving her several growth stages to compare.
“We have a point of contact, a manager, and a mentor. That’s three layers that we add to the onboarding journey, people, not policies, to make the context of our organization much more relatable,” says Gilardi. Those three different individuals are attached to the same new hire for their first 90 days. Gilardi needed the same thing a year ago, arriving as a new hire who had to learn what a developer-facing product does before she could explain the company to anyone else.
Human touch points up front
Gilardi flew to Austin this year to onboard a member of her own team in person, putting her in the room as that new hire’s manager rather than on a screen. Sonar runs hubs in Geneva, Austin, Silicon Valley, Bochum, London, and the Asia-Pacific region, with remote employees between them. Slack, Zoom, and a set of AI tools carry the day-to-day work. She counts the airports and the jet lag as the price of time she owes someone she hired. “You need to be ready to give your time to the person that you’ve hired, who has taken the time to dedicate hours in recruiting and interviews to make sure that they are a good fit and we are a good match for them,” says Gilardi.
The week Gilardi was there, the sales team held its weekly pitch in the office. She isn’t in sales, and being there live provided her with insights often left out of video calls. “You can feel the energy. It was really galvanizing,” she says. “It’s not something that I would have even noticed online. It’s something that you can feel, and those human touch points are so important in the connection that we have today.”
A first-week visit isn’t always possible at a distributed company, and Gilardi treats how soon it happens as a variable worth managing. “The more you leave it to uncertainty, the longer it’s going to take for someone to feel really crisp about what they need to do,” she notes.
People before policies
Sonar’s product is developer-facing, and Gilardi says a new hire who isn’t a developer needs a thorough explanation of its capabilities. Most of the company now comes from outside engineering, after an early team that was almost entirely engineers. Orientation weeks are built for both groups: a product session led by product developers, and a sales enablement walkthrough of how the product gets sold to people who aren’t technical. Individual departments add their own orientation material. “It’s not Nike, we’re not selling shoes. We’re selling a product that isn’t something physical, so you have to be able to understand it,” says Gilardi.
Context-setting continues past the initial 90 days. Sonar ships new releases often enough that missing a few weeks leaves someone behind, so Gilardi’s own team holds a weekly session with guests from product and sales to explain what they’re building and selling. Developers often arrive having heard of Sonar already, while hires earlier in their career have more ground to cover. “The onboarding journey is part of the story that we tell to a new hire, but it’s not where it ends,” Gilardi adds.
Setting AI’s job description
Sonar is building AI support into the onboarding journey, bringing more consistency and order into the process. Gilardi says a new hire shouldn’t have to hunt through wiki pages for a policy. “It will make sure that everyone gets to a certain standard, a common denominator in terms of the information that they receive and the timing at which they receive it,” she says.
AI is no substitute for real-world experience, and Gilardi’s concern is the habit that forms when a new hire asks a model before asking a colleague. According to the same BambooHR report, 42% of workers say junior employees rely on AI in ways that limit their growth. “The risk with AI is sometimes you over rely on it and you don’t practice communication, the social interaction that gets you to things sometimes quicker than digital tools can,” she explains.
Gilardi wants the AI layer to carry the baseline, with policies findable and timing handled. The point of contact, the manager, and the mentor then spend their time on the parts only a person can do. She expects the journey to look different within six months, based on what new joiners tell her. Where AI stops and a person starts is a call she wants her team to keep making. “The quality and those touch points should stay even if you scale, and I think that’s the next challenge,” Gilardi concludes.
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