A good onboarding experience is one of the most critical factors affecting a new employee’s decision to stay. About a quarter of organizations lose new hires in the first year itself. Though modern organizations and HR leaders understand the significance of a positive onboarding experience, most companies don’t know that hiring the right candidate is not enough.
It is essential to provide new hires a well-designed employee onboarding and orientation program that incorporates the company culture and gets them ready for the organizational goals. While most organizations hesitate to invest in such programs, there are a few companies like Quora, Netflix, LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook that stand out.
In this post, let us talk about Facebook (now Meta) onboarding and new employee orientation programs to get some inspiration.
Facebook Onboarding & New Employee Orientation – An Overview
With more than 60,000 employees (March 2021 estimate), Facebook sets an example for a successful orientation and onboarding process. Rather than welcoming new employees with conversations and presentations, Facebook implements the concept of a training program to give the employees all the tools they need to start working practically.
The most distinguishing feature of Facebook’s onboarding is the six-week introduction that all the engineers at the company go through. Bootcamp is an unbeatable onboarding program for engineers designed to immerse new hires into the code base, giving them an overview of the culture, a chance to push code for more than a billion users within a few days of joining, and helping them select the right team to contribute to.
Facebook’s orientation program aims to develop leadership qualities, foster team building, and teach how to maintain the highest standards in the work they undertake. New employees don’t join teams during their orientation program but instead move from department to department to address technical issues as they arise, to get a unique view of how the entire company works.
Welcome Kits & Onboarding Swag From Facebook
Facebook also stands out with its welcome kit and onboarding swag that not only impresses and excites new hires but also makes them feel valued and motivated. As a welcome kit, employees receive their choice of phone and laptop on the first day with a backpack, t-shirt, and other goodies and gadgets.
Facebook also impresses with onboarding swag that includes apparel, backpacks, notebook covers, and other varieties designed in the company theme. Facebook has a Design Lab where employees can constantly pick up posters and stickers. It also organizes programs where artists are invited to make something new for employees and their homes. After the onboarding process, there are several giveaways from the company with no shortage of shirts and jackets.
Apart from the welcome kit and swag, Facebook is known for its perks and benefits like free food, free barber, free bike repairs, ice cream socials, gym membership, free dry cleaning, vacations, and more.
Facebook Onboarding Bootcamp – Best Practices!
The Bootcamp is a Signature program from Facebook that has been a big success. It aims at making the company a ‘strength-based organization’ where employees are encouraged to take on a work they are passionate about. It is this onboarding program that distinguishes the company from its fellow tech giants. It doesn’t hire engineers in a specialized way like others and uses Bootcamp to find out where the employees will fit the best and work happily.
Prepare Before The First Day
Facebook begins the new hire onboarding before the employee joins the organization. It gets all the devices and systems from the employee’s phone to PC calibrated before he reports for the first day.
Start Fast
The company has a ’45-minute rule’ whereby new employees start working on something productive within their first 45 minutes at the workplace. Each new engineer is assigned a mentor and given various tasks like bug fixing on the website or one of the applications.
This shows how the company trusts its new hires and gives them the autonomy to create something so early. The point is to get engineers doing real work from day one instead of undergoing formal training, training need analysis is not necessary in this case.
Allow A Choice
When somebody joins a company, they have a limited amount of information about it. They might have heard and read about the organization but don’t yet have their own perspective. The Bootcamp program gives access to the entire code base to new employees and a time of six weeks to see for themselves how things work.
With their hands on all the products and operations, new hires can easily determine what excites and interests them the most. So, Bootcamp exposes new employees to a large number of teams and lets them make their choice.
Facebook adds ‘Tracks’ for products and features like Android development and Facebook Groups and engineers can decide at the end of their six-week onboarding session which team they want to join.
Focus On Cultural Orientation
The Bootcamp program is aimed at carrying the company culture to the new hires. During the onboarding process, the employees get a chance to connect to the mission of the company and nurture principles to work towards it.
Facebook stands out for reinforcing a unique culture of self-sufficient contribution from new employees from day one.
Is It Successful? Yes.
Facebook, through its unique onboarding and new employee orientation programs, succeeds at retaining the best talent and getting their highest contribution for its success.
It inspires organizations to ditch the mundane, boring onboarding process and get a step closer to happy and engaged new hires. Take tips from Facebook’s practices so that your new employees are productive from day one and absorb your company’s culture to align with its mission.
Onboarding process is the first and one of the most important employee experience touchpoints.
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