A new hire's first project was planning a major event happening in three months. This trial-by-fire approach is an effective onboarding method, forcing rapid learning of company systems, team dynamics, and external vendor management, which quickly and effectively integrates the new person into the team.
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The "Camcorder Method" bypasses writing SOPs. By recording a task, founders create a video asset that a new hire can watch, learn from, and then use to document the official process themselves. This confirms their comprehension and saves the founder's time.
To incentivize faster, high-quality onboarding, offer trainers a bonus for accelerated timelines (e.g., training in two weeks vs. six). Couple this with a penalty: the trainer must fix any of the new trainee's mistakes for free for a set period, ensuring they don't sacrifice quality for speed.
When hiring, prioritize a candidate's speed of learning over their initial experience. An inexperienced but rapidly improving employee will quickly surpass a more experienced but stagnant one. The key predictor of long-term value is not experience, but intelligence, defined as the rate of learning.
When starting a senior role at a complex company, a new leader should formally contract a 'learning agenda' as part of their onboarding. Prioritize a listening tour focused on frontline operations and culture, rather than headquarters, to understand the business before implementing changes.
Firms invest heavily in sourcing candidates but fail at onboarding. The crucial first 90 days, when an executive is most vulnerable, are often neglected, treating the hire as a 'done deal' instead of the beginning of a critical integration phase.
To effectively transfer a skill, first, document the process in a checklist. Then, demonstrate it live for the employee. Finally, have the employee duplicate the process in front of you. This three-step method ensures true comprehension and creates a repeatable system for all future hires.
Instead of writing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) yourself, use the 'camcorder method.' Record yourself performing a task while explaining your process. Have the new hire watch the video and create the formal documentation. This not only saves you time but also serves as a test to see if they understood the task.
When Facebook's growth stalled due to new engineers breaking the codebase, Zuckerberg instituted a mandatory, two-month bootcamp for all new engineers and PMs. This systemically solved the knowledge gap, allowing the team to scale effectively.
With AI, codebases become queryable knowledge bases for everyone, not just engineers. Granting broad, read-only access to systems like GitHub from day one allows new hires in any role (product, design, data) to use AI to get context and onboard dramatically faster.
