Setting the scene

Whether you're onboarding a junior engineer or a staff-level hire, setting a strong foundation early defines how quickly and confidently they can deliver impact.

When joining a new team you need strong steers on what these are and getting this right is no small feat. For this post I'll dive a bit deeper to show how I ensure new joiners can deliver impact, in the right way, in the most scalable timeframe.

You're only as good as your poorest performer

Having this mindset should really set in stone the importance of setting up a new joiner for success. This may look different in each organisation but, here are the questions you should be asking yourself to determine what a "successful" new joiner looks like.

• What are the timelines for new hires

  • Should new engineer be expected to be making code to production within a week? What do they need to do this?
  • What should a new engineer be expected to know about within a month, quarter, end of probation?
  • Are we using metrics like “time to first commit” or “first project delivered”?
  • What processes should an engineer be competent in and by when? Leading projects? Refining tickets? Leading discovery sessions? By when?

• What are your expectations as a leader (and vice versa!)

  • Starting on the front foot, be clear around what you expect your new joiner to be doing in the first few weeks, a checklist helps
  • Be open to your new hires desires too for the new role, they may need some support you didn't think to offer

• What documentation exists right now for day to day execution

  • Disaster recovery exercise isn't just limited to production systems. Regularly nuke a laptop if possible and see how far you can get on the documentation alone to set up your systems for local development
  • Who would the new hire be expected to work with? How are they introduced to their ways of working & expectations of engineers?
  • Think more broadly about engineering as a whole at the company too, how do we ship? How do we monitor? Which teams do we have dependencies on

• What does the support network look like for new hires?

  • Do we need a buddy system of some sort? A daily check in to touch base on progress?
  • Does the new hire understand our ceremonies and ways of working and importantly, why they are like this?

Thinking about the individual

Everyone learns at different paces too, when working through the onboarding guide adjust as appropriate to the engineers strengths. Highlight areas where you feel they need additional support & steering and leverage their strengths, map these to the career frameworks to assess where you feel they're performing.

Equally make sure they’re focusing their efforts on what matters most early on. When joining a new company, engineers more often than not bring a wealth of experience and ideas they feel could really help move the needle, and while this should be encouraged, make sure they're getting the baseline right first before moving into more "extracurricular" activities.

Finally, ensure you're creating a safe space for psychological safety, starting a new job is daunting and there will be hiccups along the way. Be open to vulnerability and demonstrate empathy when working together with a new hire.

Leveraging this moving forward

From here, having a checklist or some sort of baseline to use as a roadmap for a new hire you should put this in to practice. Make feedback bi-directional: ask your new hire what’s working, what’s unclear, and where they’ve felt stuck. Use that to improve your onboarding playbook.