The Role of Responsiveness to Change in Large Onboarding Campaigns

Onboarding is a process of organizational socialization of the new hires, that includes recruitment, orientation, training, coaching and support. While onboarding individuals into an organization is a rather straightforward task, little is known about 1) onboarding hundreds of developers and 2) doing it on a distance in outsourcing situations. Furthermore, the subject of sustainable growth with respect to organizational capabilities and culture is often overlooked. This paper reports findings from an exploratory multi-case study of two large onboarding campaigns. We collected empirical data from interviews, retrospectives, onboarding documentation and onsite visits. Based on the empirical study, onboarding hundreds of software engineers in a complex agile product development environment which lacks documentation and puts high demands on engineers’ knowledge and skills is a challenging and costly endeavor. To save the costs and for practical reasons, large-scale onboarding is organized in batches with the first batch trained onsite, and the later batches trained internally. We report challenges faced in the two cases and discuss possible solutions. One core finding is that a good plan combined with the organizational agility, i.e., the responsiveness to change, together with organizational maturity determined the success of organizational scaling. The presented cases contribute to the scarce research on knowledge transfer and onboarding in a large-scale agile context.