Offer and Onboarding: Payback for Building Strong Relationships as you Recruit

Introduction

In previous articles I have discussed the first and second phases of the recruitment process: sourcing and screening and interviewing. The final phase is to turn all this effort into what you actually want: a productive new team member – delivered by a successful offer and effective onboarding. 

Step 8: Offer 

Expectations are Set

This is where you really hope to start getting payback for your investment in a richer, more relationship based recruitment process. We expect to get a 75%+ success rate when we get to closing. We have a good relationship with the candidate, we have been straight with them throughout, they understand the likely terms of a compensation package, what their role will be, how they will be supported, what experience they might gain, who their manager will be and even what some of the difficulties might be that they face. 

Overall, they have hopefully painted an accurate picture for themselves of what their future, working for my team might be like.

The value of a career framework

This approach implies that you have defined a career framework for your team with job categories, salary bands and a clear career ladder. This may not be the case if you are still small and growing. You might know it is important but just one in a long list of tasks for engineering management and HR to do. But it is important. 

If you have clear role definitions and pay grades (even if quite wide), the candidate will have more confidence in you, in the likely fairness of their compensation and you will have more confidence to negotiate the salary that you think is right. Building a full career development framework with job definitions, skills matrices, promotion processes, pay review processes etc etc does take time. But having a first pencil sketch view of the salary bands for key roles is not that hard and well worth doing.

The Offer

Don’t screw it up at this point. Don’t get weird about money. Continue to treat the candidate with respect, as an equal in a negotiation. Know what you can pay and how much you value the candidate. They should have a salary range in their head by this point – shared with the job description / advertisement and discussed briefly early in the process. The only room left for disagreement should be whether you agree on where they sit in the communicated salary range – bottom, middle, top? 

The hiring manager’s job is to know where they believe the candidate sits in the range and have a reason to back that up. 

Negotiation

Be prepared for the candidate to disagree with you and know how you intend to respond – along the lines of either, 

‘I respect your perspective but this is the salary level we believe is right because of X, Y, Z’ 

Or

 ‘I hear your point of view and am willing to meet you in the middle because it feels like we both agree that it’d be great to have you on the team and it would be a shame not to find a way to make it work’. 

Let me challenge the budget control orthodoxy that makes perfect sense in large organisations with big salary bills. With a small engineering team, I tend to follow a don’t sweat the small stuff philosophy. A few thousand difference in salary level is not going to be the thing that makes or breaks a young business. The return on investment for a talented software engineer should be many multiples the total cost of employing them. A good hire of a motivated team member can be transformational to a smaller team. 

But, each organisation has a different culture regarding negotiation and internal consistency is important (and fair to other team members and candidates). Just don’t allow your Dr Jekyll to turn into Mr Hyde. If you’re going to play hardball at the end of the process, maybe save yourself some relationship building time earlier on – because you are about to erode much of the goodwill gained.

Step 9: Pre-joining

This is an often forgotten piece of the process. Maybe because so much thinking and discussion for the software industry comes from the U.S. where two week notice periods are the norm. There isn’t a whole lot of time for stuff to happen. In Europe on the other hand you might frequently come across software engineers with a 2 or 3 month notice period to work through. That’s a lot of time for life events to get in the way of a smooth transition.

So … if you are waiting 4, 8 or 12 weeks for your new team member to show up, you need to have a plan to keep in touch with them. This is light and simple, as most of the time, nothing happens. However, there are a few things you can do and they can help make sure you don’t lose someone between offer and arrival – it happens … I did it once. You can also help ensure the next step – onboarding – is as effective as possible:

• Drop them an email or WhatsApp message every 2-3 weeks – make sure everything is OK with them
• Plan their onboarding and let them know what is going to happen – you don’t need to leave this till the last minute
• Work through tech needs – are you buying equipment, giving them an equipment allowance, shipping them anything? Talk about their needs up front according to the constraints of your business and get kit in place in a timely manner (preferably just before day 1)
• They may ask if there is prep work to do – I would suggest nothing other than gaining familiarity with elements of the tech stack that are new to them … I wouldn’t even encourage that … but new hires are usually keen and maybe winding down from their old job so want to direct their ‘hobby’ time at something that may be useful in the new job
• Don’t be tempted to talk about projects, give access to repos, engage them in architecture discussions – they don’t work for you yet – send the signal that you respect boundaries and expect them to be disciplined in this regard too

Take these steps and you are set up well for the new hire’s arrival and the last important task – onboarding.

Step 10: Onboarding

You reap what you sow.

The dividends really start to roll in once your newly selected team member begins their onboarding. But first… what if your sales propaganda in the recruitment process was just that – propaganda? A varnished, Insta-perfect fiction.

You are about to be found out. 

Inauthenticity bites during onboarding

We talk throughout these articles about authenticity. It is much more important to be authentic, truthful, honest rather than merely ‘attractive’. Remember, every company has challenges, stresses, and dysfunctions. Every company has interesting personalities, politics and pressures. Candidates know this. They want to know what your flavour of stress is so they can better ensure compatibility with their personal bugbears, weaknesses and frustration triggers. You, of course, want to do the same. 

There’s a reason why we always ask a variant of the ‘what really pisses you off’ question in behavioural interviews. One candidate hates being kept in the dark with no understanding of how decisions are made and craves more interaction with the wider business. The next candidate loathes meetings, distraction and ‘company stuff’ and just wants to be allowed to get in the flow and produce software. Either of these two caricatures may not be right for your team and your culture.

Don’t wax lyrical about teamwork, collaboration and mutual support when point scoring on pull requests is actually the norm, Slack pile-ons are considered good sport when someone screws up or team members are encouraged to work solo, focus on their own work and not interrupt others who might be ‘in flow’.

Don’t trumpet urgency, speed and release cadence if your reality is endless meetings, decisions by committee and a CI/CD pipeline that the 1990s has requested be returned.

Don’t preach about customer obsession if your product team never talks to customers, they rarely talk to you (other than via a roadmap and backlog document), you have no idea how your product is actually used or you are drowning in bugs and open support tickets.

Don’t brag about technical excellence if technical debt is out of control, you have no process for making architectural and design decisions or an esoteric build-only mentality for every component – core or otherwise. 

You will be found out. 

The new team member will feel duped. They may not stay long (and it is usually the really good guys that will move on fastest). And if they do stay their motivation will be lower and need rehabilitating – a productivity loss and a drain on management time.

Plan Your Onboarding

Assuming you have not made any of these blunders – and, as blunders, they will have been seeded right at the start of the recruitment process, then onboarding should be straightforward. Yes, straightforward but there’s still time to mess up. 

Give onboarding the time and attention it deserves. Give the new team member a buddy – don’t rely on the team lead to do all the induction work. Have structured touch points. I have a day 1, week 1, month 1 approach when in a leadership role. Obviously, multiple times a day for the buddy, team lead and other team members. 

Think about bootcamp tasks, early projects, exposure to different parts of the team and stack – whatever is right for you team … but be intentional about it and explain what you are thinking. Check in regularly – going too fast, too slow? It’s pretty common for the new team member to say ‘too slow’. Getting the balance right on the road to high performance is one of the arts of the great manager. 

Give frank feedback – of whatever flavour is required. If you have a formal probation process, great. Make sure the new team member understands it and make sure you actually follow it … we all get busy. Put the probation milestones in yours and the new team member’s calendar on day 1.

Be supportive

Assume onboarding is a hard process for the new team member and expect them to have some issues. My mindset is that the organisation has made a commitment to the candidate and the candidate has made a commitment to the organisation. It is the job of both parties to make the onboarding as successful as everyone hoped. A lot of money has been invested by the time a new team member completes their probationary period. Don’t waste that investment by being quick to judge. 

Give the new team member the same care, consideration and support as your most trusted long-timer. Things can start badly for countless reasons and, too often, nobody invests the time to make them right. There is definitely something in the conventional wisdom that a bad hire will never get better. Every long term manager will have made hires they quickly realised were poor but it is equally possible that you have onboarded poorly. 

Make sure you make your best efforts to determine whether a hire is a mistake or you have set them up to fail before deciding to cut your losses.

Wrapping Up

If you have made it through these three articles, I hope you have picked up some tips and techniques to make your recruitment process more successful. Hiring is one of the most important tasks for any growing team. It is time-consuming, risky and uncertain. Most teams, most of the time, do not achieve their hiring goals. This is a significant cost to any business – but particularly those commencing their growth phase.

Taking a relationship building approach and applying it consistently through the entire recruitment process will help you to reap the most valuable of harvests – a high quality hire. The candidate knows what they are walking into. Many in the team will have met them. You know how best to onboard them. They know what to focus on. They get to work.

You get a productive team member fast who fits with your culture and hopefully builds on its strengths and will soon be referring their network to come and work with you too.