Nailing your your Onboarding Developer Experience 🎒
A guest article by Dana Lawson
Hey there! Last week we started our three-part series on how to hire engineers, talking about my favorite hiring principles.
As a recap, they are:
🚀 Hire as a last resort — address systemic issues and improve productivity before adding headcount.
🔄 Balance team composition — mix junior and senior roles to improve processes, optimize costs, and match work to experience so that everyone is always challenged, regardless of their level.
🎨 Embrace diversity — build teams that reflect your user base to enhance decision-making and product quality.
So, this week I am bringing in my friend Dana Lawson to continue the conversation and explore the developer experience of hiring, from first touch to onboarding, and why this matters to your company culture. Dana is CTO at Netlify and former VP of Engineering at Github, so she knows a thing or two about developer experience!
Finally, next week we will close the loop with a deep dive into how to interview engineers, with plenty of examples and real-world stories from the community.
Hey, Dana here! A tale as old as time — how do you find the right people to join your journey, and how do you allow them to add immediate impact to your business and culture?
In this article we are going to cover how you can supercharge the developer experience of your hiring process — from your job description all the way through to the first production ship of your new hires! 🚢
Here is what we will cover:
📋 Job description — what your job description says about your company, your culture, and what to expect from your future engineers. Let’s wow them before they even apply!
🎒 Onboarding — how to enable new hires drive impact in the first week and how to speed-run building workplace relationships.
⚒️ Tooling — how to apply an engineering mindset to onboarding and codify the process to help your engineers ship in week one!
📊 Metrics — Hiring cycle time, onboarding goals, and following up for sentiment with surveys and check-ins.
Let’s dive in!
📋 Job Description
The time has come — your headcount has been approved and now you need to post the job listing.
Even if you already have a template or framework, you should always revisit the descriptions: the company changes, roles morph, and like any good process you should always refresh.
Now, your job description is your first opportunity to excite your potential new engineers: it sets the tone for the company culture and how they will contribute to the mission. The importance of this is hard to overstate — many times I have seen the wrong candidates come in or, even worse, you are almost through with the hiring process and misalignment arises on expectations about the role or company. This is particularly harmful because, as we know, hiring is a long and expensive process 👇
In the internet and tech industry in the US, the average length of the interview process is approximately 24 days, while the recruitment process for a software engineer in the US usually spans about 35 days. It has been observed that filling a senior application developer's position typically takes around 20% longer (28.3 days) compared to a web application developer (23.5 days).
So, a great job description helps you 1) draw in the right engineers, and 2) set them up for success from the first touch. The way you demonstrate the values and principles of your culture through this posting is a great way to start off a positive engagement before you even have spoken to the future team member.
Aside from the standard HR and Legalese that is required for the posting, you should focus on two things:
🔥 Excitement — driving the excitement about the opportunity.
🏆 Success — explaining what success looks like in the role.
Let’s look at both!
1) 🔥 Excitement
To drive excitement, spend time on your opening statement: figure out what the elevator pitch of the role and team is, and why the person reading this post is going to have a great experience.
Keep it simple, keep it accurate, and add some character! You don’t need to write a novel, but you do want to appeal to the right candidate/engineer, so make sure you are not only describing the job but, more importantly, what are you looking to add to the team, plus a little about who you are.
Consider this initial pitch from the job description as your intro to your candidate, and practice some role-playing with your talent partner if they do sourcing or first touch — they play a critical role in the hiring journey so treat them as an extended representation of your engineering team.
2) 🏆 Success
Next let’s talk about success. Success is a tricky area, as you want to be broad, but also specific:
↕️ Be specific — about the day-to-day responsibilities, ceremonies and rituals of the team and role. Ensure if you are remote that you talk about how you are expected to collaborate and participate. If you need deep technical skills in an area, call that out.
↔️ Be broad — on the areas that people can continue to hone their skills against to demonstrate the opportunity for professional development. This area of the job description should be the closing statement to demonstrate a peak into your career levels.
Here is a quick and easy template to use:
🏢 Why [Your Company] — a brief mission statement.
🎽 Why [Your Team] — elevator pitch with personality.
🌟 Core values —highlight your guiding principles.
👑 Key responsibilities — clear expectations.
🎓 Required skills — ensure alignment with career levels.
🎁 Benefits — comprehensive package details.
Finally, here are some great examples of how a good job description can tell a story:
Next, time to discuss onboarding 👇