Managing & Onboarding New Hires

Overview:

I, along with my customer delivery manager, took on a request from a major business client that wanted to update all the maps in their portfolio with additional furniture details. They had over 1000+ maps that had to be updated with the deadline being set in September. We started this project in the spring of 2023 and we know we need more hands for the summer so we planned on hiring 8 new interns.

Impact:

1. Updated Interview questions to get better quailty new hires
2. Streamlined onboarding process to improve onboarding speed
3. Created new projects for new hire to grow and improve in techinal skills and creativity

Process:

To prepare for hiring and onboarding 8 new interns, I focused first on updating the interview questions. I had conducted the interviews for the past 2 times and there were a few questions that were a bit unclear or repetitive that caused us to not really get the answers we wanted. To combat this, I rewrote some of the questions and reordered the questions to group similar types of questions together to make the flow of the interview better and also easier for me to review the answers notes that we took afterwards.  

The first round of interviews, we spent a whole day interviewing applications but did not manage to hire the total of 8 that we needed. The updated questions did help with the flow of the interview and had more insightful answers. We waited for more applications to come in to schedule a second round of interview. After the second round, we were able to hire the 8 interns we needed for the summer.

Obstacles:

I led the onboarding training with the help of 2 other team members to monitor and answer questions as keeping track of all 8 would be a lot for myself. The training material was self guided for the most part, with checks at the end of each part. I had set up daily morning and afternoon meetings for the first week to see where each intern was at with their progress. 

During the training process, it was clear that there were 3 new hires that were struggling more than the rest of the group. There was one I took note of and started keeping more of an eye on. He wasn’t very good at learning new and complex steps so I either had to give him the simpler tasks or I had to really monitor the new tasks he was given. I did want everyone to grow and learn but meeting the deadlines that were set came first so I had to come up with some other ways for them to improve.

Solution:

There was this for fun project that our team did for the marketing team a while back that created maps with a theme or related to holidays. I thought this would be good to let the new interns do something similar so they could be creative and practice on some more unfamiliar tools they could use. I came up with some themes and gave them 2 weeks to complete it during free time or non work hours. All of them did give it a try and the team later was always looking forward to sharing and seeing what each other had done.

Reflection:

After having all 8 new hire going through the onboarding process, I knew there was a lot more that could be updated. Our company also started to adopt using Confluence for information so our team began to revamp our guides and information so that the most up to date info is easy to find across teams. I used the experience and feedback from these 8 new hire to update all the video guides and make the onboarding seamless and easy for self taught.

Later I found out, even without me at Mappedin, this creative project still lived on and I've found new maps created that were showcased on the company's website: