Seems like we’re hiring like crazy lately! Suddenly every one of the co-founders of Dasheroo has at least one direct report. Wow. We are officially up to 13 awesome people - 10 cranking away now, 2 more signed and one ‘secret weapon’ we’ll announce soon!
We’re actually going to hold off on any more new hires, it’s kinda of like letting your food digest after you’ve had a big ‘ol meal. Plus, we need to start generating some $$ to offset our investment in our team.
OK, like I mentioned before we are a distributed work environment, with folks all over the SF Bay Area, Austin and a sprinkling of additional developers in Malaysia & Siberia. So the topic of onboarding our new people is something we feel especially strong about! It’s super key to communicate our story, our competitive benefits, our expectations, our tools and give a feel of our culture. This is even more important as we hire folks outside of our ‘family’, people we don’t have prior work experience with.
So what’d we do? We developed a couple cool Google docs, that’s what. One is called Onboarding Newbies and the other is simply, Dasheroo Glossary. We really have to work on some jazzier titles for these, but they are chock full of great info, all to get our next A-team Dasherooer up to speed in a flash.
(almost) all the basic info a newbie needs to get up and running fast & efficient at Dasheroo!
The glossary includes not just our internal lingo, like ‘what’s an Insight?’ but also industry terminology, like defining what an API (Application Protocol Interface) is and why these are important to our business.
The on-boarding doc includes cool info like our story (why we started Dasheroo), information on each of our team, and our values.
We just shared these docs our Director of Sales, Mimi, who has been here for 3 weeks. She’s already provided info she wished she would have had on her day 1. Awesome!
We’ve also used Screenflow to create videos on how we do things, for instance like email marketing. A) It’s a great help to the new person who needs to learn how we do it and 2) they can refer back to it without continually asking questions.
Speaking of, I need to work on a Screenflow to record a demo to get folks comfy on how we position our product. That’s coming soon, as I’m sure lots of other helpful stuff as we get feedback from our newbies.
Now I wish we would have done this a couple months ago so all new folks could have had it, but hey it’s better to start it at Employee #10 than never!
What are your plans or policies for employee on-boarding? Let me know!
