In the age of remote work, onboarding engineers is both more critical and difficult than ever. In fact, research by Glassdoor found that organizations with a thorough onboarding process can improve employee retention by up to 82% and increase productivity by up to 70%. Thorough onboarding processes, however, take time to perfect. Without the ability to walk across the office to gauge new-hire progress, managers and HR employees alike must take the time to prepare a detailed, personalized onboarding plan for each new employee.

Yes, for each employee; individualized onboarding is essential to successfully introducing a new hire to the company. While this sounds daunting, once you have an efficient framework for general onboarding, individualizing for employees will require much less overhead than you’re anticipating.

So what’s the secret to overcoming the onboarding beast? Let’s turn to fast-paced tech giant Facebook to see how to perfect remote onboarding without neglecting your other day-to-day responsibilities.

Facebook is well-known for its rigorous, immersive six-week onboarding boot camp. Most companies don’t have the resources to create a dedicated, full-time onboarding experience for each new engineer, but the gist of what is communicated by Facebook management can be easily repeated at a much smaller scale. By providing the appropriate resources in the form of documentation, peer support, and regular check-ins, you can reap the benefits of Facebook’s onboarding process without worrying about scaling to their size.

Before Day 1

The number one deciding factor on whether onboarding is successful is whether the company and team are truly prepared for the new employee’s first day. Most engineers will agree that the most difficult part of starting a new job is orienting yourself to the new culture, products, and processes. As a manager or leader, it’s your responsibility to make this transition as seamless as possible; the only way to achieve this is to create thorough documentation and a detailed onboarding plan prior to the new hire's arrival. Here’s a comprehensive list of what documentation to have ready for your engineer’s first day.

1. Tooling & Product Onboarding: Make a complete list of every tool, account, and/or product the engineer will need to set up and familiarize themselves with. This should include any tooling used for infrastructure, incident response, project tracking, documentation, code repositories, etc. In most cases, you should only need to create this documentation one time and then reuse it with each new member of the engineering team. Your document should include:
   1. Download/installation instructions (can be a link)
   2. Source code and its dependencies with a guide on how to configure
   3. Any information about necessary API keys/credentials
   4. Sample data where relevant
   5. Test suite configuration directions
   6. How to access deployment credentials for all environments
2. 30, 60, 90-Day Curriculum: This curriculum should include any benchmarks you expect employees to hit in their first days with the company. Create a roadmap on how you expect the employees to reach these goals, and work with them over time to adjust the curriculum as needed. While it’s possible to create this document only once for each role/position, it’s advisable to individualize as necessary. Keep in mind that all engineers will have varied knowledge and experience. Tailoring this curriculum to their weaknesses will ultimately be to your benefit. All of the following should be considered while creating this document:
   1. How will you set goals for new employees to check progress?
   2. When will you touch base to review progress/alter the curriculum?
   3. Who will support the employee in their first three months? To what extent and how will support be provided?
3. Job Role & Responsibility: It is up to you as a leader to clearly list and define all responsibilities for each position in your team. The largest mistake made in onboarding is not establishing clear expectations; avoid this early on to drastically increase your chance at a successful new-hire process. Do your best to stick to the responsibilities listed, and make sure to clearly communicate with an employee should their responsibilities ever change. When composing this document, be sure to include the following:
   1. A clear definition and/or rubric for how “good” vs. “excellent” performance is determined
   2. How poor performance is addressed
   3. Performance review/promotion schedule and process, as well as what is expected for promotion/salary adjustment

These are the three main onboarding documents every company needs to give engineers the right tools for success. To further create a welcome and organized atmosphere before the first day arrives, Facebook also:

• Sends a personalized gift to the employee before the first day.
• Schedules intro calls with all relevant leaders and team members over the course of the employee’s first month or so.
• Ships any necessary hardware to the employee’s home.
• Has the new hire’s manager sent a welcome email detailing what to expect for the first day and asking for a short bio to introduce the engineer in a Slack message?

Last, but certainly not least, remember to try to automate every part of the onboarding process possible. Whether this comes in the form of compliance training, templating welcome emails/ job responsibilities, or maintaining up-to-date product documentation, keeping repeatable processes will cut both onboarding and prep time significantly.

Day 1

The day is here! At last, your engineering team has another set of hands to welcome and train. The first week, and particularly the first day, is all about setting clear expectations and providing the foundations for success. Here is a list of questions that your engineer should be able to answer by the end of the first day:

• What does your company do?
• What was this engineer hired to do? What’s the objective of the project they’ll be working on?
• What are long-term and short-term project goals?
• What tasks are most critical for the project?
• What are common issues in the project and how should the engineer respond when encountering them?
• What issues is the project facing now and what issues will it face in the future?
• Who will the engineer be working with most frequently and what are their roles?
• Is there a mentorship program available?
• What’s the company culture like?
• Who is on the company’s leadership board and what are their responsibilities?

If you have not addressed these questions by the end of the employee’s first week, you are failing in your managerial duty to provide the engineer with the context required to excel at their job. Make sure to be patient and available in the engineer’s first days, as these will set a precedent for the rest of their time at the company. Should you be unavailable at any time, direct someone else to guide the engineer in your absence. This will both provide full-time support and demonstrate a strong sense of community.

Weeks 1-2

Orientation to a new team, company, and role takes time. Expect to be guiding the employee through their first two weeks as they learn about processes and products, and meet the team. Provide the employees with all appropriate documentation created prior to their hire date and allow them a few days to set up their environment and familiarize themselves with the codebase. Make sure to check in with the engineer each day to address questions/concerns. Other important resources to provide in the first week include:

• Development and testing guidelines
• Product manuals
• Recurring meeting invites and descriptions

Whenever you and the engineer decide they are ready to dip their toes into a few small development tasks (think: bug fixes or 1-3 story points that require little outside context), provide them with a teammate familiar with the domain assigned. When the task is complete, review it with the teammate and the engineer. Throughout the entire course of your relationship with this new employee, provide and ask for constructive feedback.

As the first couple of weeks progress, continue to meet regularly with the employee to answer project-specific questions and gauge their progress onboarding to new systems. Consider allowing for pair programming for at least part of the first few assignments.

Day 75 + Beyond

By the employee’s third month at the company, you should have established a good working relationship with them and have a better idea of how they are adjusting to their new role. By this time, it is nearly impossible to templatize the employee’s path forward.

At your recurring check-in, work with the engineer to create a career plan for the following year based on their interests, strengths, and weaknesses. Be adaptive to changing this plan, and be sure to be open to feedback from all relevant parties (the engineer, their peers, etc). Should the engineer be falling behind on the pre-defined goals from their three-month plan, be sure to work with them on how to catch up appropriately. Remember that for the majority of engineers, it takes six months to be fully onboarded. Continue to have patience and be flexible during this transitionary period.

Failed Onboarding/Pitfalls to Avoid

There’s a reason onboarding is considered to be the most challenging part of the hiring process. Candidly, most companies do not put adequate time or effort into building a strong foundation for engineers to prosper. The most common mistakes in the onboarding process come in two forms:

1. Communication problems - It’s up to the company to properly communicate expectations, culture, routines, and more. Even if you don’t have all the answers, make sure to address questions as they arise and do your best to be transparent about any process changes as they occur. Here are a few examples of communication breakdowns:

• Your new engineer hasn’t been properly briefed on the company's mission Make sure every employee is in tune with leadership’s vision for the company or product. Alignment in the first days is crucial to creating a transparent and productive atmosphere.
• The company hasn't communicated KPIs and OKRs

Simply put, goals that are not properly communicated cannot be met.

• Daily scheduling is not communicated properly

Properly communicating both ad-hoc or recurring meetings that relate to the new engineer’s responsibilities seems like an obvious step, but many engineers are left out of critical conversations in their first days.

• No one has made it clear what success looks like

Establish checkpoints and benchmarks for the engineer’s first six months at the company. Be specific with what success looks like during this adjustment period.

2. Culture problems - Setting a strong cultural precedent is critical to ensuring new hires have a positive experience. Any appropriate personnel resources should be introduced early on and continue to check in to establish a clear support system for them. While mentorship is not required for each employee, it can often be helpful when navigating new roles. At the very least, each employee should have a network of peers to support them in various capacities. Watch out for the following flags that the new hire may be having a difficult time adapting:

• New-hire seems overwhelmed
• Employee does not ask questions
• Peers have not yet established a relationship

Conclusion

When an engineer has a thoughtful, welcoming onboarding experience, they quickly feel a part of the company and culture. By providing both a sense of belonging and the opportunity to be successful, new engineers will feel empowered to perform their roles to the best of their ability.