How we revamped our new starter experience, FTW!
Over the past two years, a quiet revolution has been underway at Nine Publishing (formerly known as Fairfax Media).
In 2017 & 2018, we’ve completely rebuilt, from the ground up, most of the systems running our publishing pipelines. From the journalists authoring interface through to the presentation layers on The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (and their related sites we collectively refer to as ‘the mastheads’).
This was an immense project — one worthy of its own blog post, but that’s for another day.
The new Ink platform is built entirely cloud-first: AWS, Kubernetes, Golang, ReactJS etc; it’s fully ‘buzzword compliant’ (and awesome if we do say so ourselves). The frenetic pace of platform and product launches was our core focus. It was only once we had deployed our first few masthead sites and had a moment to reflect that we started to look more closely at our employee experience, culture and particularly onboarding.
We knew it needed a similar overhaul. The way we brought on new hires was an issue.
Whenever you make a significant technology & cultural change of this magnitude in a technology business or team, there are going to be issues around training and knowledge transfer.
Our experience was no different. We hired a number of specialists, had merged our legacy squads into the new platform squads and were creating new teams dedicated to Ink as we migrated from managing legacy systems to the new.
Between some natural turnover when finishing major projects, and additional hiring, we were bringing on a lot of staff!
As a large company, our HR systems automated a lot of the mechanics of hiring — communications and the legals, all the ‘must haves’ of the hiring process. But it was missing the personal touch. There was a gap.
We wanted new starters to be excited about joining, know where to go on day one, who to speak to, what they might expect, what we stand for, and to save them from the social faux pas — wearing a suit & tie on their first day.
Glass Door reports that 84% of employees would consider leaving their current jobs if offered another role with a company that has an excellent corporate reputation. To be brutally honest, after going through some difficult years, as newspapers have been disrupted by digital technologies, our reputation as an employer could do with a lift. And, of course, it’s not getting easier to find top quality software engineers. It’s better to retain our best people than try to hire new staff.
So we knew we had problem and this is where our relationship with Sydney-based startup Enboarder began. Enboarder have created an onboarding platform that makes it easy to create a communication ‘Workflow’ that manages all the communication and touch points between the hiring manager, the new starter and other key stakeholders within our team (e.g. our office manager has a role organising their first day, so they get an automated notification a few days out day of the new starter).
Enboarder allows us to set up regular communications, normally via SMS, to both the manager and new employee, providing key information or collecting additional information.
We use it to ask the new starter for a photo prior to starting — so we can put it up on dashboards around the office during the first week. Or, to reconfirm with them a few days out, where they should go and who they should ask for on their first day. It’s like a concierge for new employees, keeping them informed and connecting them to the company even before starting.
By implementing the Enboarder platform, we were looking to take a basic onboarding experience and make it:
- Consistent & repeatable — making sure all our hiring managers completed the same steps, every time.
- Easy to do — by providing each manager with the assistance they needed to put our best foot forward, without being onerous or needing to find & read a process document hidden on the intranet somewhere.
- An amazing experience — new employees bring a new energy and level of excitement to the team. We wanted to make their first days and weeks the best it could be to maximise that passion and build a strong positive connection to the business even before their first day.
- Simple to iterate — We wanted to start small and build out. Coming from a start-up environment personally, I wanted to move quickly, get something out the door and then improve steadily.
After running Enboarder for around 9 months now, we’re very happy with the outcome. We’ve put about 20 new starters through the system.
Using our Enboarder New Starter workflow, we’ve been able to collect feedback on how we’re fulfilling our promise to create amazing experiences for new starters. For all newbies, after 30 days with the company we ask the NPS-style question:
On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company as a place to work? (0–10)
The responses have been encouraging and the conversations I’ve had with some of the new starters in our teams (“this is the best onboarding experience I’ve ever had”) have confirmed the survey responses with over 90% scoring us 8 or higher!
It wasn’t all just Enboarder though…
Connected to the much improved communication that it provides, we also integrated Enboarder with our GSuite systems & Slack, making it simple for hiring managers to trigger and track new starters using Google Forms and Sheets and keeping the rest of the team informed when events occur. We’ll be open sourcing this to share it with other Enboarder users in Part 2 of this post (coming soon!).
We’ve also completely reviewed and implemented a ‘first 60 days’ training program. This includes a number of classroom-style sessions covering everything from culture to hands-on tech with the aim of getting new starters oriented, skilled up and connected to their team mates as quickly as possible.
It’s early days, but the changes so far have made a significant improvement to our new starter experience and it’s clear, the more we invest time and energy into this space, the more positive results we see; and even small changes that don’t have to be costly can make a big difference.
We’re always looking for top quality technical people. If Golang, ReactJS, Node and Kube are your bag (or you’re keen to learn) and you want to work on products used by millions (yes millions) every month, then get in touch.
