The secret to building amazing teams: hiring isn’t everything

Read any article about building and growing a successful team and they’ll tell you the same thing: it all comes down to hiring. From Google to Sam Altman, much has been written about how to find people that will skyrocket your business.

Which of course is true, but not exactly sufficient. Just getting people to say “yes” isn’t nearly enough; what you actually do with all these great people once they’ve signed on is the other half of the equation.

Onboarding is what allows you to take highly talented people and turn them into highly talented people that are propelling your business, and quickly.

Without effective onboarding, you tend to see:

• Much longer on-ramps for employees — which directly equate to lost time and money
• Misalignment and miscommunications
• Higher attrition risk in both the short- and long-term

Done well: it’s your secret weapon, particularly during periods of high growth. At Skillshare, we’ve onboarded about half our team in the last year and have seen the dramatic difference that successful onboarding can make to both employee impact and motivation.

Some of the things we’ve learned:

• Onboarding starts the minute someone accepts an offer. The time between acceptance and starting sets the foundation for whether an employee will retain or turnover. It’s vital that new hires know that your team is genuinely excited that they’ll be joining, and that they begin to envision themselves at the company immediately. At Skillshare, this includes sending personal congratulations notes (including happy gifs from our CEO), a weekly touchpoint with the hiring manager, and inviting locals in for lunch or a happy hour before they start. For more senior hires, we may begin sharing articles or documents for reading, but only if we know they’re ready to jump in.
• Use what you learned during recruitment & reference checks. Our hiring process is extremely thorough, and as a result, we know a lot about new hires before they join — which we use to set them up for success and learning from day 1. For one recent hire, we knew that she often needed encouragement to speak up, but her ideas were great. This allowed us to ensure her manager was stopping to ask her opinion and carving out the space for her to find her voice. For another, structure and direction allowed him to excel, so we ensured his onboarding plan included more frequent checkpoints, guidance in writing, and a list of resources at his disposal.
• Trainings should include company, team, and individual context. Without each of these areas deliberately approached, onboarding will crumble. We typically see it as a funnel: individuals attend trainings with each department that give them a company-wide perspective; then spend a lot of time with their team; then dig more fully into their own role.
• Clarify expectations. New hires can’t be successful if they don’t know what success looks like. Each new hire receives a document on their first day with an overview of their role and clear outline of where there time will go in the first 30 / 60 / 90 days on staff, as well as deliverables. This is coupled with clear expectations in our team sessions around our company values and norms, including how to behave while onboarding (“ask a ton of questions!”).
• Make the first week really, really good. There’s a tendency at tech start-ups to take a sink or swim position, but when it comes to onboarding this is unfair, and frankly silly: you’ve just invested significant resource into getting this person in, now is not the time to demotivate them. For us, a healthy first week begins on a Wednesday whenever possible; includes a mix of social and downtime; and doesn’t expect the new hire to perform miracles.
• You can’t ignore the social elements. Each new hire is assigned a “buddy” at their level from another team; we group new hires into cohorts whenever possible; and we pre-schedule coffees for the new hire well into their first month (our new hires are incredibly caffeinated those first few weeks!). These relationships do two things: they make the new hire better at their job, with built-in cross-functional connections, and they allow people to be authentically themselves really quickly. The old adage that people stay for the people… it’s often true.
• Don’t underestimate the little things. Starting a new job can be anxiety-inducing in even the most seasoned leader. Being told in advance of the first day when and where they’re expected, what to wear, and what will happen at lunch can go a long way. Similarly, ensuring their desk is assigned and welcoming, technology is ordered, and reference documents are prepped means they’re not wasting their time on these things and can just get going.
• Survey, survey, survey. Successful onboarding is always a moving target: just as you solidify the company-level experience, you’ll find individual teams need support. Or as you get in the flow with communications, you’ll realize you’re way bigger and it’s suddenly unwieldy again. The key to staying ahead is constantly gathering data. At Skillshare, we run a 30-day new hire survey that checks in on both the recruitment experiences as well as their first few weeks on staff. Combined with insight from check-ins with their hiring manager and people ops, we’re able to stay nimble.

Together, these strategies have allowed us to not only bring on dozens of new hires over the past months, but ensure they can drive impact and integrate into the team as quickly as possible. Onboarding requires diligent focus — and a willingness to constantly iterate — but the return is enormous.