Our mission and your journey
Our mission is to make News UK a target destination for the best tech talent.
In a world when tech people typically stay in jobs for around 18 months, it’s super important for both the employee and the company to understand what is going to happen while they are together. We both have choices and we both have to benefit, right? In News UK Tech, we have mapped out that journey to bring transparency and structure to be sure we can build a great experience for both of us at every step.
Here, I’ll walk through that journey. I’ve deliberately kept it easy to read, using bullet points rather than long rambling paragraphs. The journey looks like this (moving from left to right):
- Attract
- Hire
- Onboard
- Deliver
- Grow
- Performance management
- Behaviour and culture
- Offboard
- Learn, adapt and share
Here’s what each individual step means.
This is where we broadcast what it’s like to work in News UK Tech. We do this by:
- Writing blog posts
- Attending and presenting at Meetups
- Speaking engagements
- External communications
- Building an engaging careers page
- Creating ‘working here’ videos
- Always building a talent pipeline
We have built a great set of processes to help us choose and hire brilliant talent quickly, consistently and successfully.
- A dynamic open vacancies page
- Great job descriptions that are gender neutral
- Being fully open and inclusive so we build a diverse workforce
- A fast and easy application process
- An application tracking system
- Interview best practices
- Clear and frequent candidate communication
- Clear talent selection criteria
- Focus on quality and speed to offer, with a target of two weeks from ‘hello’ to offer
First impressions count. When someone first arrives with us we want them to feel welcome, informed and prepared.
When they start, each new joiner will have:
- A thorough company and technology induction process
- A welcome information pack
- A personal details sheet (line manager, account names, welcome check list and more)
- Loads of online resources for help and advice specific to new joiners
- An onboarding buddy
- A discipline lead, there to help
- Laptop and accounts ready
- Access to how-tos, set up guides and materials
- Feedback loop to keep improving our hiring and induction experiences
Our induction process
We’ve designed a five step induction process:
1: Every new joiner (tech and non tech) gets together with our HR team for a whole day to learn about our company, our history and our policies.
2: The next morning, new tech people will get together for an hour or two with our tech onboarding team and some current staff to go through a technology induction.
3: After the tech induction, spend an hour diving deeper into the people, best practices and ways of working specific to your discipline (Business Analysis, Data Science, Engineering, Project & Programme Management, Product or User Experience & Design).
4: A hand over to the new joiner’s team for a brief team welcome and induction, taken to their new workspace and given their new laptop. It’s ready to go with accounts, passwords, email addresses, software and relevant account accesses.
5: Sometime in the first month, get together with the other tech new joiners for pizza and chat.
News UK
Put simply, this is the bit our people are paid for (it’s their ‘job’) and we want to help people deliver their best work. We do this by:
- Having constantly improving standards and best practices
- Using common tools and procedures, letting us focus on delivery rather than decisions
- Communicating best ways of working
- Encouraging experimentation and discovery
- Collaboration in all directions
- Internal and external tech talks
- Knowledge sharing
- Recognition for great work (general shout outs, showcases, flash talks and ABC Awards from our CTO)
So often missed by so many companies. Everybody understands the obligation to deliver (because it’s your job), but we have a reciprocal obligation to grow our people too. We positively want people to develop themselves and to grow, even to the point where they have become so amazing they are poached by other companies. If we get that right, we’ve done a good job (and my experience tells me that in such an environment people don’t want to leave).
We do this with:
- Regular 1:1s, feedback and personal development reviews
- Discipline specific career frameworks with clear step change objectives leading to development and training plans
- Communities of practice and guilds
- A dedicated discipline lead to help with personal and career growth
- Conference attendances (and speaking opportunities, if that’s your thing)
- Coaching and mentoring (giving and receiving)
- Management training and best practices
- Mobility and opportunity
- Market checked salary bands
We want an environment where achievements are celebrated and standards are constantly rising. This means asking more of top performers and helping others achieve their potential, raising the bar across tech. We do this by:
- Annual Personal Development Reviews (PDRs) with regular check ins
- Use the discipline specific career frameworks to identify help, training and objectives where needed
- Not letting consistent low performers impede the standards set by high performers
- Building objectives and culture around high performers
- Encourage and enable upwards moves
Underpinning everything we do is behaviour, culture and respect. We work together for hours a day, and everyone should feel valued, equal and respected.
We do this by:
- Bringing our best selves to the workplace
- Leading by example
- Having diversity and inclusion at the heart of everything we believe, say and do
- Helping and encouraging our peers
- Acting and speaking positively
- Holding each to account for our actions and words
- Offering and accepting feedback
Everybody leaves at some point. So rather than ignore it, we celebrate it. In fact, I talk to candidates about the day they might leave during the interview process, and describe how I want us to have a great mutually beneficial journey until then. I want them to deliver their best work for us and I want to grow them so their next opportunity is even more amazing than this one. My experience is that if you get this right, people don’t really want to leave.
When someone decides it’s time to move on, we celebrate that with:
- Friendly exit interviews
- Showing appreciation for what they have delivered and achieved
- Wishing them well in their future
- Positive reinforcement of their time with us
- Gather feedback about their experience at News UK
As much as we do this for the leaver, we also do it because it helps build an amazing reputation for News UK in the job market. For every happy leaver who speaks well of their time working for us, we open the door to more people wanting to join us.
This won’t be absolutely right straight out of the blocks, so we’ll keep being agile with it. We’re also one part of the bigger News Corp world. We share this with them and learn from what they are doing too to bring about improvements across the board. We will:
- Work across disciplines and titles
- Collaborate with News Corp
- Learn from successes and failures
- Adapt & improve this model
- Communicate learnings externally
- Involve everyone
Summary
So there we have it; your journey through News UK. We really do want News UK to be a target destination for the best tech talent. We’ll do that by creating a great end to end experience for everyone who works here.
We can’t achieve this without great people. If you’d like to join our team and be part of this journey too, take a look at our careers page.
