If you've never had to onboard an employee from scratch before, it can be a little daunting. You want to start your relationship off on the right foot and a chaotic onboarding process won't impress anyone. Here are some of the things you should do to make sure your employee has a smooth first few weeks.
Full disclosure: This post could easily be 3x as long - there's a ton that goes into onboarding new employees. In order to keep it digestible, I tried to focus on areas where I've seen founders and new managers stumble the most.
Obviously, this will include their manager (probably you), but depending on the size of your company and your other responsibilities, you may want to designate a separate mentor as well. Make sure they're included as you figure out everything else on this list.
Set them up in your HR software as soon as possible. If you're a remote team, you may need to file additional paperwork if you're hiring in a state you've never hired in before. Make sure that any details about benefits, vacation time, company policies, etc. are written down somewhere that your employee can easily reference them.
This is actually harder than it sounds. You will want to pick a manageable, possibly fairly short, project. You will also likely want to pick a project where you've already done a lot of groundwork in terms of scoping, figuring out the tough questions, etc. It's fine to let your new employee rediscover some of that, but it will be harder to guide them if you haven't done some amount of pre-work. Once you've decided on a project, write down the details so your employee can reference them as they work.
Depending on the role of employee, it may make sense to have them work on a collection of smaller tasks. In that case, you should think about what you want their first week to look like.
Make sure you schedule time with them to go over their first project in detail. One thing you want to focus on is making sure they're able to feel like they contributed quickly. For developers, a common tactic is to have them fix a small bug their first day before diving into their larger projects.
Now that you have an idea of what they'll be spending their time on initially, make a list of what they'll need. This may include access to certain tools, introductions to specific team members, materials they need to read to get up to speed on your product, and more. You may realize some of the important information hasn't been written down yet. Take the time to document it now! It's worth it.
This is one of the bigger friction points when onboarding a new employee - forgetting to invite them to meetings! This is even harder in a remote world when they can't see their entire team head into a conference room and ask what's going on. Add them to daily standups, all hands, planning meetings, 1on1s, etc.
You'll also likely want to do a couple of meetings in their first week to go over their first project and introduce them to members of the team. One option is to ask key team members to go over a specific concept with the new employee - for instance, one might walk them through the architecture, another might go over the set of internal tools you use. This has the added benefit of spreading out the work of helping the new employee get up to speed.
It can be incredibly frustrating to join a new company and feel ignored or forgotten by your manager and mentor. Adjust your meeting schedule so that you'll be able to answer questions a few times a day, and make sure to proactively check in as well. If you're using a more rigid onboarding model like a 30/60/90 day plan, you'll also need to set aside time to assess their work and write up evaluations.
Remember, this person is brand new to your team, your company and maybe even your industry. They may ask questions that feel obvious and they may ask them more than once before the answer sticks. That's okay!
If you find yourself getting frustrated, look inwards first - was there something you could have done differently that would have helped? Explained in a different way, provided a resource, schedule time to talk in person? Often, early issues are more the fault of the manager, mentor or company than they are the new employee.
An onboarding process should evolve slightly with every new employee onboarded. Make sure you ask for feedback from your new employee along the way. You can even ask that they make updates (or even create new) to documentation and other materials as they go, to help keep everything up to date.
Okay, this is the most optional one on this list. I created a Notion template to help keep you organized as you work on your employee onboarding plan. It's a great place to start if creating everything from scratch is feeling overwhelming.