What have you prepared for your new hires?

In the past year, I had changed my job 3 times, not saying I’m proud of it, but it is what it is.

Before those frequent moves, I had been working for the same company since graduated for almost 5 years, and like everyone I assume, once you did it, it gets easier and easier.

However, that’s not the story I wanted to tell.

The story I wanted to tell is, what I experienced as a new joiner in those moves, the good, the bad, and what I think are the keys to happy new joiners.

From my experience, there are several types of onboarding experiences that I witnessed and in some cases, were part of the process, whether creating them or subjected to them:

• Nothing at all: At some point, you will survive. Let’s call it a Charles Darwin strategy
• Read the docs: We have all the documents that the guys who are leaving tomorrow prepared for you at some internal sites, browse them all and get to work quickly
• Read the docs, and join a few sessions: We also document everything, while you are reading it, we prepare some session that does not have clear agenda, to be honest, let’s join our stand-ups, plannings, 2 overview sessions on what do we do, then you are good to go
• Curated sessions: We care about new joiners, we prepared all the docs and we ask our seniors to set up the sessions for everything we think you should know, we have a one-pager of what tools we think you should have

The first two are quite rare but could be seen in small companies that have super high turnover-rate and people focus on delivering, and surviving and do not have enough time to think about the team. I don’t need to explain further what’s wrong with these 2 strategies and where do they lead to. The life expectancy of the engineers joining this kind of onboarding is usually not satisfying for the company, and there’s a good reason why people do not stay.

Reading the docs and joining a few sessions is quite a common theme, the team knows that they need to prepare something for the new joiners, but they do not want to put their efforts into it, said to be too busy. They have been asked by their leaders, managers, or whoever is in charge to write documents, documents they write. they have been asked to onboard the new joiners, they set up a session, explain what they do (on the fly), what are the ceremonies they are having, then at some point, it gets blurry and you become part of the team.

This one is not the worse of course, but it makes new joiners lose context, and do not feel they belong to the team or even the company. in some senses, these lack of efforts also demonstrates how the team lack of passion in building something together and being able to achieve longer goals together.

From my experience, joining a team with this vibe made me feel like everyone just wants to get the job done from what they are told to do and just call it a day. There are no critical thinking, initiatives, let alone innovations that will come from the team.

Curated sessions is what I believe is kind of good enough in that people joining can adapt themselves more comfortably, having everything at the tip of their fingers and they can see the path going forward in first few weeks. believe me, these few weeks matter a lot. First impression for the company itself also depends on these weeks.

Having the How-tos, for example, What tools do you need, Where to find them, How to install them internally, helps new joiners pick up the pace quickly so they have more time to getting to know the team, picking up contexts and these are important.

Having individual sessions for each topics, order by priority also helps managing expectations and warming up new joiners to progressively adapting to the team, leave them enough rooms to understand the context better in each topic.

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so, Does it mean that preparing all the docs, how-tos, sessions are good enough?

I would say, it could be better. In my recent moves to my current company: Adevinta (it’s been over 6 months now since I joined), I did see a missing recipes that I did not experience before and I want to share them with you guys. I’m not saying it’s the best, but at least some of the things I experienced were really useful to me.

1. Onboarding documentations

Having a dedicated section in team’s documentation shows the team has commitment and it’s consensus that every members agree on putting shared effort into making this happen and obliged to follow what was agreed.

The key sections on this document may consist of

• Tools and accesses that you need: This is better done is a verifiable step that you can check you really have everything ready
• Sessions you need to join in the next 3 months! this is a little detail that the sessions are spread across wider time to allow new joiners to digest and getting used to the context.

Apart from the documentation itself, what really helps new joiners is the word: CONTEXT. especially if the team has a long history and/or has a lot of things going on. the current members might forget that in their discussions they might talk about some jargons, topics that require background understanding or political context in some cases.

Refreshing the context in the beginning of every conversations in the first few weeks really really helps new joiners to be onboarded with the team without feeling lost and this will accelerate their speed of being able to contribute in the conversations.

2. Buddy

Even though, the documentation might be very clear, and you have planned sessions ahead of them for a few weeks but, you cannot expect that just reading a document will be enough. there will always be gaps, misunderstanding, lost tracks in the process. With assigned buddy, you will be accompanied with people to help you unblock the blocker you face. instead of trying to guess or go in to deep in some non-related stuff, you can reach out to your buddy to unblock you on any tutorials, assignments. this helps you get onboarded quicker and gain the confidence little by little.

3. Expectations!

This is the most important part for me above all of the points mentioned.

Having a written down expectations is super helpful, at least for me, to set my mind straight what to do during the upcoming weeks, or months. As a new joiner, without clear expectations, everything seems to be unknown and unachievable. with written down expectations in a document where everyone has access to, it helps me a lot to focus on what I should do first in the first weeks.

For example,

First week, you should have all access and tool in the list(links), have the understanding of what the team is doing and what the organisation is doing.

Second week, you should be able to create one of the simple application in development environment.

Third week, you should work on one of the small ticket with your buddy help.

Third month, you will join an on-call rotations, etc, etc.

With this, it’s easy for me to set my plan to achieve each goals like conquering a quest in your favourite game.

The team also marks some of the tickets as good-first-issue ™️ that aims for new joiners to work on it without much help to get them to know different parts of the system little by little.

The difficult part here will be yours to decide what is the proper goal to set to , not rush and overload new joiners too much and at the same time, not too relax which will hold new joiners to not able to demonstrate their talents/skills.

4. People

For me, hearing the repeated messages from the team that, we are in here for a long run, don’t rush too much and keep learning, are greatly helpful. it allows me to be calm, follow the plan, and at the same time, don’t feel too much pressure trying to settle in the new environment.

Also, the culture of finishing before starting: help unblocking others first before starting new things, is also a key to keep the team’s dynamic flowing and as a new joiner I really appreciate seeing people trying to help unblocking others, keep things moving forward as a team. I will try to write about this culture in the future blog post since I find it really interesting.

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That’s all guys, feel free to give me your comment whether you agree or disagree, or share your onboarding experience you think was worse, or better. I would be really glad to read all of them.

Lastly, I want to give a big Kudos to my Common Platform Runtime Team @Adevinta for their effort of putting this together, and as part of the team we will commit to keep improving the process.

Until next time!