The End of Your Startup Hiring Process: Employee Onboarding
This is the final part of an eight-part series, exploring the ins and outs of growing your startup team. From attracting talent to developing an interview process, get ready for a complete crash-course in building your early-stage startup team.
Click to read all eight parts as a complete post, or download as a PDF.
Hiring a new employee will have a significant impact on the rest of your startup team. In their first days and weeks, it’s likely that your team’s collective output will decrease, even though you’ve got an additional team member, as your new team member gets to grips with their new role.
Your new employee’s onboarding experience is directly linked to how long it takes for them to get up to speed with their workload, so it’s essential that you give this some thought, prior to them joining. Here are the six most important things to cover during onboarding:
1) MEET THE TEAM
It’s hopefully obvious that you’ll need to introduce your new employee to the rest of your startup team — as early as possible on their first day. As well as names, you should ensure your new hire knows who works on what, so they know who to go to for specific queries.
One of the most effective resources we’ve seen startups use for new hires is a who’s who Trello board (or similar tool), which includes everyone’s photo, name, job title and areas of expertise. While you can add as much or as little detail as you like, something as simple as this is an invaluable reference point for new starters surrounded by unfamiliar faces.
2) KEY TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES
Your new employee will want to get up-to-speed as quickly as possible. To facilitate this, it’ll be helpful if you have all the key tools and technologies set-up and ready to go.
For example, when I joined Cobloom, as well as having my computer set-up, I also had an email account and accounts for key technology such as HubSpot, project management tools and time-tracking tools already set-up.
This saved valuable time on my first day, and meant that I started off with access to all the most important tools I would need to use, day-to-day.
3) SOCIALISE OUTSIDE OF THE OFFICE
When I joined the Cobloom team, one of the most valuable parts of my onboarding experience was having time scheduled in to spend with the team outside of the office.
Arranging a team lunch or after-work drinks will make it easier for your new employee to get to know your startup team, away from their desks and the constant distraction of work. It’s a relatively easy way to help your new starter feel like ‘part of the team’.
Key to this is going out of the office: many startups we speak to are trying to build a relaxed, welcoming office culture and so have might often get takeaway in the office, or have a couple of drinks in the office at the end of the week, but going out of the office means that your team focuses on socialising with each other, rather than eating/drinking as quickly as possible and then getting straight back to work.
4) CHECK-IN REGULARLY
Don’t just sit them down, assume they’ve got everything they need, and leave them to it — that’s the easiest way to make your new hire feel like an outsider on your team.
Providing sufficient support is essential for helping someone settle in — especially if they’re joining a small, very tight-knit startup team. You might want to have a dedicated team member for them to go to with small, day-to-day queries — someone more accessible than you or your co-founders.
Additionally, you should make it a priority to catch-up with them regularly — perhaps after their first week, two weeks, one month. This will provide them with the opportunity to ask any bigger questions, and get feedback on their initial performance.
5) RAMP-UP
The goal of your onboarding process is to provide your new employee with the skills and information they need to transition from knowing nothing on their first day, to being a fully-contributing member of your team.
As a result, your onboarding needs to gradually ramp-up over their first days and weeks. Their first day will most likely be very light, with lots of time dedicated to meeting your team and general orientation and administration. Then their first week will be mainly information-sharing and time for learning about their role. From there, over the next few weeks you should plan their workload to gradually shift their focus from learning about the work to actually doing it.
For developers, this may mean pair programming with a more experienced member of your team; for marketers they could create content working from an outline provided for them; for your sales team they could sit in on sales calls and gradually shift from listening to leading the call themselves.
6) DON’T SKIP THE SMALL STUFF
It’s easy to get so focused on the big picture — helping your new employee settle in and get up-to-speed with the rest of your team — that a lot of the small stuff gets missed.
Employees will have a ton of questions about the minutiae of your startup: how to use the printer, how to claim expenses, office hours, lunch, when they get paid… If your startup is growing rapidly and hiring a lot of people in a short amount of time, it’s a good idea to put together some sort of welcome pack that addresses these small, frequently asked questions; it will save you time answering them every time, and will give employees something to refer to rather than feeling like they’re constantly interrupting to ask another question.
STARTUP HIRING: CLOSING THOUGHTS
Building a successful startup is hard. You need to develop the right product at the right time, and have sufficient resources available, to enable you to out-grow your competitors.
This means that you’re constantly juggling three competing priorities:
- Money — are you running out of cash? When do you need to raise your next round of funding?
- Product — have you built a product people actually want? Would a product pivot more closely align you with the needs of your customers?
- Team — where will you find your next hire? Who should your next hire be, and how will that fit in with your existing team structure?
It’s clear that hiring is one of the most pressing, ongoing considerations for startup founders — and one of the biggest challenges you’ll face. Many startup founders aim to build a startup that improves people’s lives — but forget that the people whose lives they can have the biggest impact on are their team, not their customers. Building a great team is a prerequisite to developing a great company culture — one that gets employees excited about their work and passionate about the problems they’re solving for customers.
In the early days, one wrong hire can literally make-or-break your company. But a great team working in a company with a positive, inclusive and dynamic culture can be the competitive advantage your startup needs to outgrow your competitors. That’s why it’s essential to get a comprehensive hiring process in place early, to help you avoid the critical hiring mistakes that can cripple an otherwise-promising startup.
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