Even tech giants have humble beginnings.
In the halcyon days, when Google was making the transition from a bedroom to a rented garage in Menlo Park, it won’t surprise you to learn they didn’t have a tight onboarding process in place.
For years, Google ran on a single, sprawling spreadsheet including a ranked list of the company’s top 100 projects. The projects were confusingly graded on a scale between “far out” and “skunkworks”, and the founders handled the process with a ‘who cares’ attitude.
Since that point, everyone knows Google has made leaps, not only in the Internet space, but also in the workplace. The company is the #3 world’s most valuable brand and the #3 best employer in America. They’ve made extremely effective tweaks to their hiring process over the years, but what isn’t reported as often is their approach to new employee onboarding — the process of getting a new hire equipped with everything they need to integrate into the company culture, work effectively, and succeed.
The wackier aspects of Google’s orientation process are widely known. We’ve heard about the Noogler beanies with motorized propellers, and the Mountain View all-Noogler TGIF meetings where the founders “just come in and make some dad jokes”. The inner workings of the process, however — the parts that make it so notoriously effective — aren’t as obvious.
In this article, I’m going to run through the nuts and bolts of Google’s ‘just in time’ employee onboarding process, and some of the supporting events that happen during.
Let’s jump right in!
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