Recorded zoom sessions can provide great reference material for building onboarding material or even used as onboarding videos themselves1.
Set onboarding and mentorship goals:
- 30/60/90 plan
- An alternative to the 30/60/90 is a less rigid, but still goal oriented process. Naomi Kriger detailed her spreadsheet process in a medium post1.
Onboard team members through story telling
Understanding the technical structure and infrastructure of a company’s product can be duanting during the on-boarding process. Particularly for junior employees. You can improve the process by creating a story of the user journey at a high level. This should include visualizes, some corporate history, and not contain low-level details2.
Onboarding Juniors to a Technical Team
Task-based onboarding
Use structured tasks to test and measure onboarding. Particularly for juniors this can be essential for learning and growth plans3. For example:
Create a toy repo, after the employee feels they have a strong feel for git, ask them to perform a series of common tasks that would encounter on a day-to-day basis:
- Staging work
- Making a well formed commit message
- Diff against a different branch
- Rebase a branch with conflicts
- Open a PR on the toy repo