Tips for Onboarding

So you’ve hired a new employee! He or she may have combined feelings of excitement and nervousness during onboarding — and so do you! What exactly is the procedure to onboard a new hire? Is there a procedure? While there is no rule for having an initiation process for a new hire, it can make all the difference for the new hire and for the existing team. A great onboarding process is an aspect of developing a great company culture; this should also increase employee retention.

Here are some procedures you may want to consider for your onboarding process:

Introduce the new hire!

You wouldn’t want a senior employee to stop them and ask, “Hey. Are you new?” Gather the employees together, introduce the new hire, and have the senior employees introduce themselves. Or you could send an email. In any case,  make the new hire feel welcome.

Shower them with gifts!

I’m not joking! If you attend a career fair and don’t get an offer, at least you get free pens from the company. Isn’t that one of the perks? New Twitter employees receive a bottle of wine; New Warby Parker employees receive a copy of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, which is where the company gets its name. Neil Blumenthal, one of the founders, states that this aspect of the onboarding process is to help build the company culture: “…we’ve established a bunch of rituals that we think reflect the values and the culture of the company we’re trying to build.”  

Don’t leave them in the dark!

Make sure you answer all the inevitable questions:

• Where’s the copy machine?
• Whom does the new hire reach out to if they have more questions?
• Coffee’s fine, but is there a possibility of making tea?

The new hire should know about the resources and how to use them.