After interviews and tests you took the step, and have just decided to hire a remote freelance developer. So, what’s next? Whether you are the company’s CEO, product manager or project leader, you will want to make sure your new hire will be productive from day 1. The following list, made after years of onboarding in remote teams, will help you check for any blind spots to get the most from your new developer.
Accesses
Let’s take advantage of your new hire from the start. We don’t want to waste hours in an initial setup when we have the chance to move with anticipation. So in this case, if you need to work with your infrastructure team to grant access to git, VPNs, JIRA, etc, you’ll need to create your preferred corporate secure email or in case that’s not available, use the developer’s email (With Hand-Picked, you can use their @hand-picked.io address for this purpose).
With the email as a starting point, you can create all other dependant accounts, and just wait for those confirmation or verification clicks on day 1.
Objectives
There are always tasks in our backlogs that need to be done that are suitable for onboarding processes. Also there are new features or big changes to implement. It is very important to have both kinds of tasks ready for your new developer, so you can assign them right away.
Suggest reading material
Is there any heavy download that the developer may need to start? Is there a way to start doing it before day 1? Sharing a link before starting could make this ready for the project beginning. Also, every project has peculiarities that make it different than the previous one. Maybe you use a novel library, VM or architecture that would need some reading?
An enthusiast developer undoubtedly would go and check and study all this new info beforehand.
Build Instructions
With projects complexity increasing by the day, build processes also became lengthier and more complex. Be sure that in your company’s wiki or knowledge base the process is up to date, so that doesn’t become a problem during the first build for your new hire. Obviously, it could happen that there is no doc available, so anything will help, from an email to a quick chat telling about any quirks in the process. This also includes accesses to any Continuous Integration platforms you may use, at least in the development environment (if every commit or pull request trigger new builds where the developer may need to check for errors).
Communication
Development teams spend a substantial amount of time in communication platforms, less than with their IDEs, but a lot nonetheless. As with other accesses, this one is particularly important as generally different teams are in the same platform, which may help with the initial setup (or any greeting or welcome rite you may have).
Project Tracking
So you have your objectives, deadlines and user stories. How the new developer will check them out? Let’s make sure they have access to the tool you use for this purpose.
Is your project starting from scratch and are you creating a remote team? Start creating boards on Trello and analyze it later in case you need an upgrade to Jira or other platform.
Introduce them to their peers
Introducing the rest of the team is of key importance as the developer starts working on their assignments. Sooner than later they will interact with designers, QAs, other developers, etc. Be sure you introduced them or let them know those names so they can quickly jump into those needed conversations.
Anything extra to sign?
Legal stuff, always important to have them already done so we can let creativity flow. If you need any extra NDAs or contracts, be sure to sign those deals before day 1. If you hire through Hand-Picked, we’ll be sure to remind you about this.
Company equipment
In case your Company workflow involves providing a laptop or equipment that may have already solved many points previously mentioned (already installed VPN, emails accounts already setup, necessary software installed) be sure to ship it at least one week before the initial date with your new developer.
Different countries have different times for their customs processing and anticipating it for at least one week with express shipping carriers -like DHL or FedEx- will make this less of a problem.
Final thoughts
What do you think about these points? Many apply to both new in-house developers and contractors, so we hope this guide helped you.
Hire your next Hand-Picked developer
Hand-Picked developers are motivated from start, so you will find them actively looking to integrate into your team as soon as possible. They will be open to any suggestions even before the contract begins, so you are welcome to communicate even if there is some time left before the project starts.
Cover Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash