How to Onboard Engineers 🎒
The most effective tactics to do it fast and well, backed by research and case studies.
When it comes to hiring and retaining talent, software startups have it the hardest of any industry.
The average tenure of a startup engineer is less than 2 years, and shrinking. Out of these, on average six to seven months are spent to bring the new engineer up to speed in the company.
An outstanding onboarding process is one of the most effective ways to make this better, because it brings two benefits:
Faster integration — top quartile companies make engineers ship production code in less than one week, and fully onboard them in three months.
Reduced turnover — engineers who experience good onboarding have a significantly longer tenure.
When you combine the faster integration with the reduced turnover, investing in your onboarding process becomes a no-brainer that has easily the highest ROI of all of your hiring initiatives.
In the past few weeks I have talked with the best managers I know and researched onboarding case studies from successful companies. I matched all of this with my own experience and tried to condense everything in 2000 words!
So here is my guide on how to onboard engineers. It collects the best tactics I know of, which are:
⬅️ Start before day one
👫 Assign a buddy
🤗 Create relationships
🚚 Ship code in a week
👯 Pair on tasks
🗺️ Create a plan
✂️ Tailor to the candidate
📣 Get feedback
Let’s dive in 👇
⬅️ Start before day one
Your onboarding process should start right after the signing. Waiting until day one is not only inefficient — it is risky too. As Gergely points out:
Many companies are losing candidates after they sign the offer because the employer stops communicating with them. Then, as a cold shower, the candidate emails the firm, revealing that they’ve accepted another position and won’t be starting.
The signing time always carries some momentum. Build up on it instead of wasting it.
Here are three things you can do before the new hire starts:
Let them know about the onboarding plan — anticipate what the first days / weeks will look like. Get them excited about joining. Based on their availability, send them some material in advance to look at.
Ship hardware — as Andrea from the community points out: “make sure the equipment (computer, monitor, accessories, ...) is ready for day one. Especially now, due to the supply chain issues, let your IT department know the specifics of the computer asap so they can arrange that on time”.
Create all the accounts — Email, Slack, Jira, get everything ready for when they start. There is nothing worse than having to wait for things that could have been done easily in advance.
👫 Assign a buddy
Some call them buddies, Wework calls them Onboarding Champions, Robinhood calls them Onboarding Mentors. The point is simple: have someone accountable for the onboarding process of a new hire.
This is opposed to the common strategy of having training done by multiple people, each about their own domain. A dedicated person to run everything, instead, has a few key advantages: