Tips for New Hires

At AccelerEyes, we’re in the middle of doubling our team which causes me to reflect on those things that make a new hire’s experience really awesome:

• Culture is the #1 thing that matters. AccelerEyes has a strong culture, akin to other startups and fast-moving tech companies. A common challenge new hires face is to shed slow-moving organization mentality, perhaps picked up from academic environments or big national labs where pontification is embraced over production. In our startup, we move quickly and everyone’s output is on the frontline, directly impacting our customers.
• Efficiency makes a huge difference. New hires should look to make a quick early wins. We like to find little projects that can be done from start to finish in a few days. We like to get into a nice iterative development loop together through meaningful, yet purposefully small projects. Once we’re in a good cadence of production together, we can look to bite into more meaty projects.
• Monitoring Skype and chiming in on team conversations helps with rapport. We welcome all chatter there, and it’s a great way to connect together. For remote employees, usage of a nice mic headset and webcam is really nice.
• For developers, new hires should pay attention to coding styles, including picky things like indentation. Ask our veterans for their “.emacs” file to get synchronized.
• For those in Atlanta, we like to eat lunches together around 12:30pm. Lunchtime conversations are great for brainstorming, planning, and building relationships – all without reducing efficiency of the work day.
• New hires can participate in our customer community on our product forums. There is no better way to start a new position than to immediately become useful to customers.
• New hires can become knowledgeable about our website and product documentation. An understanding of how customers perceive our company’s online presence is very valuable.
• Flexibility is really important. The on-boarding process is a time when we are getting to know each other. It is hard to know what roles the new hire will best fill without a little trial and error. Sometimes we need new hires to contribute in ways that push them out of their comfort zone. That’s all part of the dynamic startup environment.

Those are some of the thoughts that have crossed by mind over the last several weeks as we’ve been bringing new team members on board. I’m sure everyone will do marvelously well in the transition, and I’m thrilled for what the future holds.

What thoughts do you have about ensuring a successful on-boarding process for new hires?