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Recruiting and hiring talent can be a long, expensive process: Finding the right engineer can take upwards of 60 days (and hiring the wrong person can cost more than $200,000). But the work isn’t done once your prospect signs an offer letter.
Often companies overlook onboarding for their new hires. While it’s normal to want your team members to be productive as quickly as possible, skipping over an onboarding process can lead to more turnover, decreased productivity, and wasted money.
With a handful of simple steps, however, you can help pave the way for a smooth onboarding for your new hire and set them up for a long, successful tenure on your team.
The Value of Onboarding
With employee turnover risk at its highest since 2015, taking the wrong steps with a new hire could be a costly mistake: Gallup estimates that replacing leaders and managers costs around 200% of their salary, and replacing technical roles will run you 80% of an individual contributor’s salary.
Fortunately, you can seriously limit the risk of early turnover with the right onboarding strategy. Onboarding can help improve new employee retention by upward of 80%, and improve productivity by more than 70%.
9 Tips to Onboard an Elixir Engineer
- Start Before Day 1
The best onboarding begins before your new hire even starts. During the interview process, be sure to assess not only technical needs but also whether or not a candidate is a good cultural fit.
Include behavioral interview questions that can offer insights into how a potential team member might handle specific situations. Consider the challenges facing the team your new hire will be joining: Are top-notch communication skills crucial? Ask about a time when they had to communicate effectively to move a project forward. Or maybe it’s vital that they’re used to keeping up to date with developments in Elixir. In that case, ask what they do currently to get up-to-date industry news.
- Offer Comprehensive Training Materials
If your new hire is also new to Elixir, it’s critical to give them the appropriate training materials to help them transition to using the language. You can start with the documentation on the official Elixir site or use open-source training like the DockYard Academy.
If they have prior Elixir experience, it’s still a good idea to create a list of resources for them to review. This sets the tone for the best practices you expect all your engineers to follow, and can be helpful if the new team member needs to brush up on a specific library or framework.
Regardless of your new hire’s Elixir background, consider creating internal documentation specific to your project to bridge the gap between general Elixir knowledge and the specifics of your codebase.
- Don’t Forget the Non-Technical Training
It’s easy to focus on the technical requirements during onboarding, but there are plenty of non-technical topics to cover as well. Does your team rely heavily on email to communicate, or do they prefer a messaging platform like Slack? How far in advance should a team member communicate upcoming PTO? What’s the expected way to give updates on a project?
All of these topics—and more—will have a day-to-day impact on your new employee. Giving them a solid understanding of what’s expected as a team member can go a long way to integrating them into your organization’s way of working.
- Set Clear Expectations
Onboarding can be a time of uncertainty for anyone. Communicating clear expectations around roles and responsibilities can go a long way toward making your new engineer feel more comfortable in their role.
At DockYard, we use a set of roles and competencies to clearly identify what success looks like in a given role. These cover everything from the required level of competency to the behavioral anchors that we expect, such as seeking regular feedback or communicating professionally.
By clearly laying out what it takes to be considered successful in a given role, you also give your team insight into what it takes to advance to the next level, which is an important step to incorporate a defined career ladder.
- Encourage Pair Programming
Learning an established team’s ways of working can be daunting for a new hire. Add to that the potential challenge of coming into a project partway through, and it’s understandable that a new team member might want some guidance.
Pair programming helps remove siloed knowledge and gets your new engineer up to speed quickly. It also gives them the opportunity to ask specific questions about issues that might impact their role.
- Promote Code Reviews
You probably covered technical skills and needs during the interview process. But code reviews can help go a step further, and offer a quality control mechanism and teaching tool.
When an existing team member reviews your new hire’s code, they can get immediate feedback on how to produce work that’s up to your team’s standards. And, by reviewing your existing team’s work, they can pick up on best practices and get insight into established patterns and conventions.
- Make Use of Community Resources
The Elixir community offers a wide range of resources for developers of all skill levels. From the ElixirLang Slack to the Elixir Discord, Elixir Oasis Discord, and multiple newsletters, community members are constantly discussing new topics, solving problems, and more.
Putting together a list of community resources your new hire can turn to helps them improve their skills. It also gives them sources to stay up to date with any developments and best practices.
- Offer Mentorship
Even if you’ve hired an experienced Elixir developer, providing a mentor can help them settle in faster and start working productively more quickly.
A mentor can be a source for new hires to ask questions about internal processes that might not have been covered in your other onboarding materials. They get the security of knowing they have a source of information, which helps eliminate uncertainty that can hinder their productivity.
- Foster a Culture of Continuous Learning
Elixir is constantly evolving. It’s expected that changes will continue to come, and keeping your developers up to date with the latest is crucial. Set a standard early to encourage new hires to keep up with ongoing learning opportunities.
If you can, set aside dedicated time for professional development or encourage team members to share insights with each other. Make it clear early that continuous learning is the norm to let new hires know that they’ll be expected to stay on top of the latest Elixir developments.
The right onboarding process can mean the difference between a new hire who gets up to speed quickly (and reduces your time to productivity costs in the process), and one who starts looking for another job after just a few months. By investing some planning time before they start, you can reduce team turnover, save resources, and build a more successful product development team.
