The world’s top tech companies use bootcamps to onboard their new employees. Here’s how you can run your own induction bootcamp on a budget.
More and more of the world’s leading companies are moving towards month-long induction bootcamps to welcome new employees into their organisation. Top tech companies such as Facebook, Dropbox, Salesforce- and Australia’s best place to work– Atlassian, have adopted bootcamps as a means to onboard new employees.
But goes on in an induction bootcamp? How are new employees kept busy for that whole month? And how can you implement your own employee induction bootcamp without being a billion dollar tech company?
Determine if new hires are right for your organisation.
Hiring new employees is always a risky venture. Candidates who look good on paper and say all the right things in the interview can still fail to perform on the job. An induction bootcamp is a way to examine your new employees at work.
Facebook makes new hires live and work together during their induction bootcamp, developing software to be pushed out to its billion users. New hires are encouraged to push code live to users on the fly, creating changes to the website right from the start. The induction bootcamp is an opportunity to change new employees’ mindsets on work. Facebook needs to make sure new employees have adjusted to the fast-paced workplace where anything goes.
Induction is an opportunity for new hires at Facebook to decide if the organisation is right for them. Anyone not willing to ‘move fast and break things’ will know in the first couple of weeks. New employees at Facebook are expected to push out code that could potentially break a website used by a billion people every day. They need to be prepared to take that risk before starting.
Get employees doing productive work faster.
One of the most effective ways to onboard new employees is to get them doing productive work. Both Atlassian and Facebook expect their new hires to push out live product updates within the first couple of days of their induction bootcamp.
The sense of contribution achieved by induction bootcamp removes the ‘new guy‘ stigma from the hiring process. Employees already know they can contribute to the organisation straight away.
Dropbox use a similar induction bootcamp to Facebook. Their organisation doubles in size every 12 months. Spending 3 months at Dropbox means you’ve been with the company longer than 30% of the workforce. Fast growing organisations can’t afford for new hires to feel like the ineffectual new guy for 6 months. New hires are expected to deliver value straight away.
Bring employees into your culture faster.
A famous aspect of Atlassian’s onboarding process is its hackhouse. The hackhouse is typically a bunch of graduates grouped into a house together, working away at Atlassian tech on new Mac books.
The hackhouse is essential to bring graduates into the culture of Atlassian. It helps graduates adjust to life at Atlassian, which would be drastically different to any other workplace they’ve experienced before. Recent graduates would have only heard of Atlassian if they read the business papers on a regular basis. Atlassian acknowledges that, and gives graduates the opportunity to adjust to their new working life.
The goal of the hackhouse is for new hires to collaborate and play as a team. New hires start on valuable work faster, and feel like part of the organisation by the time their induction bootcamp has finished.
Spending resources on the hackhouse shows new employees how much value the organisation places on them. Investment in new employees pays off in the long run with added productivity and goodwill from the employees in future.
Retain employees longer by starting them out on the right foot.
Organisations have the greatest impact on employee engagement during the onboarding process. Organisations that take more time to onboard employees stand to improve engagement and productivity down the line.
Salesforce goes through great lengths to start new employees off right. They have a ten step process to onboard new employees and decide where they can add value to the organisation.
Salesforce goes out of its way to give new employees the best possible start. They bring new employees together by inducting new employees at the same time, giving multiple employees an experience they can share.
The strategy behind Salesforce’s induction bootcamp is that replacing employees costs 1.5 times the amount of the departing employee’s salary. Onboarding new hires correctly from the start reduces costs from lost productivity caused by replacing employees.
Get the paperwork for your new employees out of the way early so you can focus on induction.
All of your employee induction bootcamp strategies will go to waste if new employees get caught up filling out forms.
Send your company documents to new employees online and electronically, so they can fill them out faster. You can focus on inducting and growing your new employees once Their details are in your company’s system.
Watch a demo of HROnboard onboarding new employees to see how much easier it is to welcome new employees online. Once you have the paperwork out of the way, you can send them to your induction bootcamp and make them part of the organisation.
HROnboard Demo from HROnboard on Vimeo.