Onboarding Metrics
Part of The PIRATE Way — Stories about scaling up engineering teams.
Onboarding Metrics: The Compass to Refinement
When embarking on the journey of refining an onboarding process, it’s not enough to rely on intuition or anecdotal feedback. Metrics offer a clear path to understanding effectiveness and areas of improvement.
Background
Every process needs measurement — both in quantitative and qualitative terms. While retrospectives are an effective tool for refining processes, my commitment has always been to incorporate tangible metrics that make the identification of opportunities more straightforward.
Here’s what we implemented:
- NPS-kind Survey: Back at TravelPerk, together with Joan Bermúdez, our Engineering HRBP, we designed a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. It evaluated the efficacy of training, technical exercises, and the local environment setup guide. This provided a quantitative trend to monitor.
- Personalized Feedback: I personally held a 1:1 with new team members around 4+ weeks after their joining. This helped gather direct feedback about the process, understanding what resonated, what was lacking, and areas of potential refinement.
However, as the team grew, managing individual meetings became challenging. This feedback process was then delegated to Engineer Managers and Tribe Leads, adjusting the timing to the end of the 2nd and 3rd quarter of the member’s tenure. It’s essential to note that assessing onboarding’s effectiveness can be challenging for those unfamiliar with our tech stack.
Time-based metrics have also proven crucial. Just as “time to hire” is pivotal in the hiring process, ensuring no delays post-offer acceptance or during onboarding is equally imperative.
Metrics
- Time to Onboard: This metric captures the duration between offer acceptance and actual joining. It’s especially vital for VISA-sponsorship candidates, where inefficient processes can lead to extensive delays. Workarounds, like hiring candidates as freelancers or using payroll partners for temporary international employment, can help mitigate these challenges.
- Time to Onboard Completion: Onboarding is the activation phase. Defining what constitutes “successful activation” is subjective to your particular context. It can be the first PR/MR in production, it can be the completion of the onboarding guidelines, or anything that makes sense for your specific context.
- Onboarding NPS: While extensive literature is available on the Net Promoter Score, our objective wasn’t to identify promoters per se. Instead, it served as an effective barometer for new member satisfaction. A score above 0 indicates a positive reception, above 20 is commendable, and anything above 50 is exceptional. An NPS above 80 places the process in the top echelon. But the real value lies in monitoring trends; any significant drop in score over a period warrants attention.
Let metrics be your guiding star as you embark on the quest to perfect your onboarding process. They provide insight into current efficacy and illuminate the path to continuous refinement. Remember, every data point tells a story; we must listen, interpret, and act.
Remember: This is a blog post from the series “The PIRATE Way”.
