It’s always a good idea to evaluate your onboarding process. You might be surprised at what you find!
The first step the engineering team should take is to form an onboarding committee. The committee must include several engineers who have joined the company, some engineering managers and one other executive from across the organisation that could help provide insights about what it takes for team members to get up to speed quickly.
The purpose of this committee is to evaluate the existing engineer onboarding process and plan out how to improve it. This includes asking questions like: Are we delivering information in the right way? Is our training effective? What do we need to change?
Once the committee is formed, you should start looking at how the current onboarding process for new hires works and try out different approaches until you find one that works well. Then you should go back through the existing onboarding process with your new approach in mind and make changes where necessary so that both new hires and existing employees benefit from them.
After a few months, this work will pay off—and you will see an increase in satisfaction among new hires and faster ramp-up times among engineers who had already been with the company for a while.
We're always improving our onboarding process and we'd love to share some of our insights with you. Here's a four-step overview of what we've found works best:
Step 1: Understand the Company’s Goals
Onboarding is a process that takes place after a new hire has been hired. Onboarding is about helping new hires get up to speed, integrate into their new teams, and make contributions as quickly as possible in a sustainable way.
All managers want their new hires to be ramped up quickly, but this is especially important for software engineers because they're an expensive resource.
Step 2: Always work to improve your onboarding system
First look at the onboarding program for new hires in engineering.
Ask yourselves: What went well? What didn’t go so well? And what questions new hires still had at the end of their time on board?
Afterward, discuss and prioritise action items based on our findings. For example, one piece of the puzzle was helping new hires get set up in their dev environment within their first five days on the job. But managers are often too busy or don’t have enough time in their day to sit with new hires and walk them through this task. The committee ultimately decided to use an engineering buddy system—designating a team member as each new hire’s buddy and assigning them tasks in onboarding.
Step 3: Reflect, Learn and Implement
The onboarding committee should meet regularly to reflect on how the onboarding program is shaping up. They'd add things to their backlog and get rid of tasks that were confusing or unhelpful, ultimately tackling some of the high-effort, high-impact tasks they'd outlined, such as creating a code lab environment for new engineers to play around in.
The committee gathers feedback from managers and new hires informally to ensure their changes are effective.