How we created a self-guided handbook for new design hires
Discover our core onboarding values and how we leveraged them to create a new onboarding experience.
This posting expresses the views and opinions of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yext and its affiliates, employees, officers, directors or representatives.
Our small team relishes the opportunity to iterate to improve our processes — onboarding included. We only train new folks once or twice a year, making it very important that we seize every opportunity to evaluate and improve our onboarding process. After onboarding Ming in August of 2019, we decided to take a larger step towards a scalable onboarding solution that would support simultaneous designer onboardings and demand less of our existing team resources to get people up to speed. In a collaboration with all members of our team — especially our new hires — we developed the Consulting Design Onboarding Handbook.
Our Onboarding Handbook lives in Guru, a knowledge management platform that Yext relies on for all its internal knowledge storage. Our handbook contains 4 modules composed of a mixture of live training sessions, self-guided Sketch exercises, readings, and other tasks like shadowing and administrative set-up. There were three driving forces as we created this new onboarding process:
- New Hire Autonomy — To mirror the autonomy of our role, we added various elements of control for the new hire. For example, instead of having all live sessions scheduled for the new team member, we give them all the information for the different sessions, and they are in charge of finding available times in their peers’ calendars.
- Repeated Exposure — There are a lot of concepts, big and small, that we need our new hire to thoroughly understand. We don’t expect anyone to reach complete understanding after one session, and so our onboarding relies on redundancy to ensure understanding. In the first week, we throw a lot at our new team member, hitting them with a “fire hose of information”. All we expect at that point is recognition of these concepts. As the new hire works through the Sketch exercises and training project, they go from recognition to familiarity, then getting a basic understanding. Ultimately we aim for the new hire to finish onboarding with not just a deep understanding of our various concepts, but also clarity on how they relate to each other.
- Adapted Education — We understand that each person will have a unique path through our onboarding. They may immediately understand our Sketch standards, but struggle to see how each step in the process relates to each other. Office hours, shadowing sessions, and frequent meetings with the onboarding mentor offer ample opportunities for our new hires to raise areas of confusion, and for us to double-back on topics to ensure we don’t end onboarding with gaps in their understanding.
After crafting this overhaul to our onboarding process, we were excited to put it to work this summer while onboarding our newest member, Kevin, and our summer intern, Ben — both starting within just a few weeks of each other. One big area of uncertainty was pacing. Although we maintained a lot of the same sessions from our old onboarding process, we were also adding a lot of new activities, and couldn’t be sure how long it would take for a new hire to consume and internalize the information from those self-guided activities. Luckily for us, both team members were willing pioneers — rolling with the shifts in timelines, and raising questions, concerns, and feedback throughout the process. Kevin spotted a few oversights that we were able to fix before Ben started, which helped to make Ben’s intern experience all the better. Here is some of Kevin’s thoughts on his onboarding:
Initially, the self-guided nature of our onboarding process seemed daunting. I was not expecting to have full autonomy over my work schedule at such an early stage! However, it set a trend within me to rise to the occasion and go beyond my own expectations. Having all of my onboarding resources laid out at once made me a more efficient learner. The idle time I could have spent in a virtual call or waiting for a response could now be replaced with active learning — making remote onboarding more effective!
Overall, our improvements were largely successful, especially given how the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to onboard both team members fully remotely. The self-guided work and autonomy allowed for the onboarding to feel less like a nine-to-five zoom call, instead giving our new teammates control over their own schedule to take breaks when needed! We are really happy with how the new onboarding handbook took shape, and are excited to continue to use it, iterate on it, and ensure an effective and enjoyable onboarding experience for new hires down the line!
P.S. After writing this article, we have put our onboarding process to the test once again! Michelle joined our team, and although we didn’t change our process too much for her experience, we decided to have her undergo the required internal coursework, Hitchhiker Training, before she began her role-specific training. This gave her a solid foundation of what the Yext platform can do, which provided her great insight into how our work informed the other aspects of our client’s experience with Yext. We are excited to continue to iterate and think more about how this big picture framing can inform our team training.
