My previous onboarding experience

In my previous role, I helped create an onboarding process for new hires for engineering roles. From a high level, I understood what was necessary for a successful onboarding. The main objective was to get the new hires familiar with:

• Company’s structure, processes, and procedures
• Culture and how teams interact
• Team’s standards and practices
• Role’s required knowledge

In a startup, where things are rarely documented, the onboarding process is quick and light. It’s up to the manager’s discretion what to focus on. We had documentation of needed access to each role, so setting up accounts was seamless. The team’s standards and practices were documented somewhat. The culture was the least documented as we never really defined it. I knew how to carry myself as an IC and manager, but we didn’t have our values written down yet.

The new hires would have their access set up on day one (our IT team was spot-on). I would meet with the hire to talk about the company, the culture, and the team. Then it’s off to the team lead/senior engineers to perform technical onboarding.

The differences

After being onboarded at a much bigger company, (Indeed) with 15k+ employees, I noticed a few differences. The objective was the same, but an extremely heavy emphasis was put on the company’s structure, process, and procedures. There were layers of onboarding, where I had to learn so much about the company and how to act like one of its employees. There was quite a bit of mandatory training on HR-related, legal, and compliance matters. Everyone had to go through this training annually, so it isn’t once and done type of thing. There were several checklists to help keep track of what needed to be done each week for the first 3 months.

The biggest difference I noticed was how structured the onboarding process was. It was intensive, and there was little room to add anything else on top of it. I had to onboard a new hire to my teams and I barely had to think about what to do as everything was documented and checklists were readily available. The process seemed very repeatable and therefore highly consistent. It was a lot less stressful to carry out the predefined tasks knowing that you’re not likely to miss anything important.

Conclusion

In smaller teams/startups, the onboarding process rests on the shoulders of the managers on what to do to help new hires get up to speed. It feels more ad hoc and personal. At bigger companies, the process is documented and repeatable and therefore more streamlined and consistent.