Some companies fall into the trap of misevaluating new hires during their probation period, whether they overrate or underrate them. Building a solid onboarding plan should help set new hires up for success, ensure they're engaged, and help them progress. Although new hires are expected to be curious about the organization’s mission and familiarize themselves with the business and technology stack, they won’t be able to do it on their own without proper documentation, access to the organization’s tools and codebase, and understanding their priorities.
Onboarding Plan
Having a solid onboarding plan is key to positioning new hires for success. Although onboarding plans look similar for the same role, each new hire might have a different onboarding project and stakeholders. It's worth building an onboarding plan template and defining an onboarding project for each hire prior to their joining date.
Orientation
In 2017, when I joined Expedia Group, the team put in good effort to educate me and the new joiners about the company’s vision, key stakeholders to meet, and how Expedia’s tech organizations are structured. Although I was overwhelmed with the amount of information, the team left a great impression of the company and showed they care about the new joiners' success.
Orientation is not only about explaining the company’s mission, vision, etc. It also helps to break the ice with the new joiners, share with them the excitement about what you’re doing, and foster a culture of inclusion. Otherwise, you could just share the company’s goals offline.
Onboarding Project Scope
An onboarding project won’t just help the new joiner familiarize themselves with the organization’s tech stack, tools and business domain, it will also help you as a manager assess their skills. I usually pick or design projects that don’t have a close deadline, touch on the team’s tech stack and business domain, and can be broken down into 1–2 week milestones. One of the mistakes I made was assigning a new senior software engineer a complex project, basically migrate one of the company’s small products from on-premise to the cloud. This project required business domain knowledge, understanding the product architecture and cloud hands-on experience. The new joiner couldn’t complete the project within 3 months, despite the team estimated it to take around 2 months. Although by the end of his probation period, all indicators pointed to him lacking the required skills for his role, I wasn’t able to make a decision; the project’s milestones became mixed with him learning a new technology, and understanding the product’s architecture along with the business domain.
Learning from my own mistake, I now spend more time designing onboarding projects, with clear milestones that I could assess the new joiner’s skills regularly. I ensure that each milestone has a single topic for the new joiner to learn, either a technology or specific area within the business domain.
(Tech) Mentor
Everyone on your team might be busy designing, coding or troubleshooting a production issue, no one is available to help onboard the new joiner. This is a common situation tech teams tend to have. However, focusing on delivery might be a short-term goal, having one of the team’s members onboard the new joiner will be a win-win; it will help the team increase their throughput by having one more productive member, improve their mentoring skills, and help the new joiner deliver earlier. I remember in 2012 when I joined Progress Soft, a payments solutions provider, I worked with Ahmad Saleh, a software engineer, who was my mentor and onboarding buddy. Although I had good experience with the technology stack we used, the payment domain was totally new to me. Ahmad helped me understand the banking check cycle, roles of presenting, paying and central banks, and how Progress Soft systems integrate with the banking systems. Despite the lack of documentation, without Ahmad’s mentorship and guidance, I don’t think I would have delivered my first project within my first 3 months. Mentoring a new joiner will consume time from you or your team, but it should pay off as soon as the new joiner is brought up to speed.
Regular Check-ins
Setting expectations, assigning a clear onboarding project and milestones, along with guidance from a tenured team member should give the new hire a kickstart. However, this might not be enough without providing them regular feedback on their performance, what they’re doing well, and what they can do better. I prefer to have weekly 1:1s with new joiners for the first three months, regardless of their level. I believe those meetings will help us know each other better, ensure they’re having the right guidance and support, and provide feedback as early as possible.
Demos
Encouraging new joiners to demonstrate their work to the team, leadership and business partners should help them build rapport with different stakeholders, reinforce their understanding of the project they’re working on, and promote a collaborative working environment.
Early Participation
As the products, tech stack and tools your team owns evolve, the onboarding documentation should reflect those changes. A new joiner might be the best person to update this documentation while they’re still in the onboarding process; setup steps should still be fresh in their minds. Such tasks don’t only keep the onboarding documentation up-to-date, it also encourages new members to participate in the team’s artifacts.
In conclusion, a well-structured onboarding plan is essential for efficiently integrating new hires into an organization. In fast-paced environments, it is easy to overlook onboarding in favor of other activities, while investing upfront can make a huge difference.
Developing an onboarding plan might take some time, it's important to have it prepared before the new hire starts. By providing a well-defined project that can be broken up into small milestones, assigning a mentor, and offering consistent support through regular check-ins, companies can ensure that new employees have the tools they need to contribute meaningfully and can be easily evaluated for their skills.
