Remote Onboarding: How to Save New Hires from Social Isolation

Level-up Engineering

Interview with Jerie Shaw, Senior Technical Program Manager at Shopify about building a remote onboarding process to suit the needs of remote software engineers. Coming up with new ways to get developers familiar with the job, keep energy and engagement high, and integrate them into the team while they're often continents apart.

This is how Shopify deals with onboarding remotely.

In this interview we're covering:

• Differences between remote onboarding and in-person onboarding
• Methods to integrate new hires into a group remotely
• Stakeholders in the remote onboarding of new hires
• Breakdown of Shopify's remote onboarding process
• Tracking the progress of new hires
• Mistakes when setting up the remote onboarding process

Excerpt from the interview:

"Solving problems together energizes people. On the other hand, spending an entire day on a video call drains their energy. Knowing this, we redesigned the onboarding experience to be active, synchronous, and hybrid.

We give a group of new employees a real challenge, like ship a dashboard or build a data pipeline. They work on it together at the same time. We provide them with support structures like a virtual pod for better collaboration, and experts on the topic to answer their questions via Slack.

This gives them a sense of being with a group and working on an interesting problem without being trapped in a video call for eight hours straight."

Click here to read the full interview!