Ask HN: Best practices for onboarding new employees?

That was your opportunity to take over.

You should have started drawing up strategic vision charts, cheesy motivational posters and started talking to people about getting in touch with their authentic values.

You have an actual cubicle? What heaven employer is this?

At my current company, I am in charge of hiring and engineering management. We are a small startup that is doing some very interesting but technically difficult things.

After my own on boarding process and casually quizzing the rest of the team, I started to realize that everyone on the team, from their perspective, worked at almost a totally different company than everyone else. I don't think this is too uncommon, especially in the early days of a thing, but we had a team member leave us so I asked if I could do an exit interview. The candid perspective I got from him was invaluable.

He had a very similar experience to my own, where from day one expectations felt like shifting sands. I spent a few weeks really thinking about it and came up with this on boarding plan that we are using now.

I broke it out into 3 months. I then talked to our CEO and head of development about what they would like someone to know and be exposed to in our company. I then broke that out into two separate on boarding plans. One was focused on learning about our customer experience, and the other a technical track. Then I took a look at our stack and documentation, and started an overhaul to put easy to read and find docs in a single place and make sure that on their first day they could type one command and run everything they would ever touch.

On your first day at you start with us I provide the outline of what you can expect over the next three months, the customer experience track is actually pretty fun and by the end of month two you are working on an independent study with our data tools. The technical stuff is pretty light weight, but covers some of the stranger parts of our system. You're given plenty of time to learn and ask questions. The first month mostly working just with the developers and figuring out communication patterns and stuff. The second month you'd take on a small feature as a champion and work directly with design and product, and you're encouraged to explore through improving our docs/tests or building one off prototypes that you think would be neat with our product. By the third you've been exposed to everything in our universe and hopefully if we've done our job right, everyone feels like they have agency, know's who to talk to, and is really excited to work on some interesting and challenging stuff.

The dual on boarding curriculum are in a git repo broken out by subject and month and tied right to our knowledge base. I personally think creative agency is one of the most important things for getting the most out of new hires and setting the tone. So that was kind of the focus of the scaffolding I put together. You can squash a fantastic asset by being aloof, having confusing practices, or in general just not being sensitive to how people learn and being reactive to it.

Advice I'm usually hired to research, and implement: If you're looking for an onboarding workflow you will be able to find lots out there. The sales people will all say they can solve what you're after. Dont believe them until you can map your proceess out in detail for them in writing. Don't belive their technical sales person, talk directly to implementers as you will be handed off 3 times before the project starts and the message will be lost. If you can't it will be a mixed bag. I recommend looking at a modern hr tool like bamboohr, or adp workforcenow. For your size something like BambooHR is the best place to start to start and the price point is solid, and flexible enough for you to focus our as you go.

Key feature: A tool like Bamboo (I'm not affiliated) will create onboarding checklists and tasks for both the employee and internally to complete the setup tasks as needed. Multiple checklists (global, department and position) can be attached to each position and are ready for the next hire. This feature is missing from most hris, onboarding or applicant tracking systems.

I have sytemized and automated onboarding processes taking 21 days down to a few including external testing and checks. If you have some questions, happy to chat offline.

My company is about the same size as yours, although we hire a lot of interns each summer so we've probably onboarded ~40-50 people. Here are some things I'd suggest:

First off, I'd suggest that you change your stance on whether or not they should be productive on day 1 and whether or not they should be a time suck for the CEO. At a 20 person company, if the CEO isn't personally owning hiring, culture, and onboarding, then they're not doing their job. New employees are super expensive, and it's a no-brainer to invest an extra week or two of work to help set up long-term success. I'd suggest optimizing for how productive they are at ~3 months rather than on day one.

For us, the first ~week is pretty much full-time onboarding. That doesn't mean they're always doing stuff (no one can absorb that much information) but it means we have a pretty defined schedule for that first week. It's a mix of the following:

- General company onboarding: this is mostly me and one of the other leaders at the company telling our story, explaining our industry, talking about how most startups work and then contrasting that against how we work. Going over the employee handbook with everyone, etc. We've found that any more than an hour per day of this type of thing turns new hires into zombies, but if you spread it out (normally 4-5 hours over the first week) they find it really valuable.

- Job-specific training: For developers this means getting them into the code base (we normally do a lot of pair programming the first week or two until they're up to speed). For support it means learning the product, answering sample contact forms, etc. This takes up the majority of their time.

- Getting to know the team: we schedule several activities to give new hires a chance to meet each other (if more than one person starts around the same time) and the rest of the team. Their peer mentor takes them out for coffee. They play board games or darts with various members of the team just to get a chance to chat. We have company-provided lunch once per week, send them on a scavenger hunt so they get to know the area around our office, etc.

- Brain breaks: starting a new job can be really stressful, and most people are too nervous to admit that they're exhausted and aren't really retaining new information anymore. I'd suggest building in at least one 30-minute block each morning and each afternoon (maybe even more than that) for them to just go off on their own and read a book, mess around online, etc.

It took us a few years to refine this, and I'm sure your approach will be different. But I guess my main piece of advice is to just give up on the hope that this won't be disruptive. Whoever is primarily responsible for onboarding (ideally the CEO at first, or the new hire's direct manager once the process is worked out) should just cross off the first week on their calendar. Even if you don't know what you're doing, you can overcome almost all possible problems by just putting in face time and actually giving a shit about the person you just hired.