The Request
Build an onboarding experience so comprehensive that we can stop screening for hard-to-find prior experience in our hiring.
The Details
Hiring and retaining diverse technical teams can be challenging. But Giant Machines believes that those challenges are rooted in the assumption that a traditional technical interview is the best way to identify strong talent. When you plan to train specific technical proficiencies instead of screening for them, you expand your recruitment pool by an order of magnitude. Your hiring team can seek out candidates with harder-to-teach qualities: quick learners, excellent communicators, and natural collaborators.
The Challenge
Develop an onboarding experience that gets entry-level employees to contribute meaningfully in 4-6 weeks.
The Insight
When you screen for candidates who have the proficiencies that are the hardest to teach, you’re building a roster of team members who will be qualified for leadership in the next phase of their growth. When you pair that hiring practice with immersive, rigorous, person-first technical onboarding, you supercharge your new hires. When compared to team members who are “thrown in the deep end,” the average NETO-trained new hire will make contributions in one month that are comparable to those of an engineer with 6-12 months of tenure.
The Approach
We surveyed employees who joined at entry-level positions after they had reached 1-2 years of tenure about their experience so far and asked them what technical skills would have been the most useful to have in their first months on the job. We then worked with subject matter experts like Lead Engineers to develop the technical training sessions, and with team managers to develop the “ways of work” sessions. A total of 72 teaching sessions took place, each with guidance from the Giant Machines Learn team. This helped our experts teach excellently without having to be (or become) excellent teachers.
The Delivery
After two months of collaborative preparation with leaders of each discipline, our Learn team operated as the primary point of contact for 10 new engineering hires and led the delivery of over 100 hours of facilitated training distributed over their first four weeks of work.
* Subject Matter Experts from the Product, Design, and Engineering teams at Giant Machines led about a third of all sessions, so NETO participants had the chance to learn directly from the leaders of each discipline.
* By facilitating the remainder of the sessions without utilizing what would otherwise be billable hours from senior team members, the Learn team was able to head off many common misunderstandings and mistakes without throttling the productivity of any existing project teams. As a result, most of the first 40 hours of technical training were facilitated by a few specific seasoned instructors from the Learn team. These instructors leverage research-backed strategies to create a culture of accelerated learning, specifically through psychological safety.
The results
On the first day of NETO, participants were asked to rank their proficiency in 8 technical skills. Participants were given an identical survey on their final day of NETO to assess growth.
Participants also rated their understanding of our ways of work, as well as their confidence in their own capacity to succeed at Giant Machines.
The Reaction
NETO1 Participant
NETO1 Participant
NETO1 Participant
NETO1 Participant
NETO1 Participant
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