Onboarding New Hires

"one amazing, and just the context, I'm really old at Shopify now... people that would join my team already knew how I thought. It was pretty onboarded a lot of the PMs that would join my team because obviously, they're going to look for who their leads is and Google that a bit"

"I created, it's actually when I joined Ancestry... I decided I was going to adapt all of those things into a summary and then I was going to try it real time in my blog... it's focused on listening and learning first and then doing. So that's the crux of it, which is in those 90-days it's like you got to get used to the environment. You want to have some impact at the start. You want to have a couple quick wins, but you want to understand the lay of the land and you want to listen."

"So the tip with one by one is when someone joins, help them feel a sense of belonging, and you can do that through not having their first day be them sitting over there alone. You could have someone have a first pair."

"I recommend to a lot of founders for maybe their first 10 or 15, or 20 employees of just have a relationship design conversation with each of them when they're first hired."

"The 90 day plan is something that's overused but so necessary, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. So that component and then, okay, a year from now, what should this person be doing? Two years from now?"

"How do I ramp them up as quickly as possible... make sure it's clear what success looks like in their first 90 days? And then how do I help them secure early wins essentially? So I often will suggest, 'Hey, you should do this presentation. It's a great way to get visibility early in your journey here.'"

"I actually hadn't joined a company since my first internship in college basically. And I was like, 'Oh, how do I onboard myself? How do I get myself up to speed? How do I balance making sweeping changes versus understanding what's not broken about it overall?'"

"Do not promise things that you can't control... being honest and upfront about who you are as a company, about what you're able to promise, all of that is actually... it's very hard work but it's so important."

"I think that in-person onboarding for new folks is really important for everyone. For any new person to an organization, I think how we work culturally, having a contact that you can reach out to, all of that I think is really crucial."

"You have to have a different way of recruiting, a different way of onboarding, a different way of career development. And if you do all of those things, you end up with a 10% turnover rate, so that your people are there 10 years on average, and you can then get them trained up to deliver that kind of service."

"Great companies has a very small list of golden rituals. And there are three rules of golden rituals. Number one, they're named. Number two, every employee knows them by their first Friday and, number three, they're templated."

"Starting January, we're going to start having our APB program and they're going to come into LinkedIn. We're going to teach them how to code, design and PM at LinkedIn. They're going to go through a pretty rigorous training process, and then they're going to join those pods."

"One of the fun use cases that we've seen actually with folks is they'll often actually get Devin's help to onboard new engineers on the team. When you're new and you're joining, there's obviously a lot of questions that you have about the code base... It's nice to just be able to ask Devin and to go through Devin's wiki and to understand these internal representations."

"I want to try and make that 45 days, if not 30... giving them responsibility early on for something... 'Here's everything we did last additions. This is the results. These are your responsibilities, these are the expectations. Go.'"