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I have gone through Quora engineering onboarding twice--first when I interned in summer 2014 and more recently when I rejoined as a fulltime employee four months ago.There are several components of our engineering onboarding process, and I'll give an overview of a few of them:MentorshipEvery engineering new-hire or intern is paired with a dedicated mentor. Mentors generally sit within a desk or two from their mentee. My mentor last summer was Laura Scharff, and this year, I was under the mentorship of Matt Wiethoff. Laura and Matt are Carnegie Mellon University alums, so it sure seems like CMU is graduating some really good mentors!During the first ~2 weeks or so, new-hires and interns will typically meet one-on-one with their mentor for 30 minutes. I have used these 30 minute meetings for general technical questions, product-specific questions, and pair programming. And of course, mentors are generally available for spontaneous questions whether in person or over chat. The formal mentorship process can continue for however long the mentee wants. In my case, I worked very closely with Laura throughout last summer when the whole Quora codebase was new to me, whereas this time around, I was more familiar with the codebase and worked closely with Matt for just about a month.Another channel for mentorship is the Technical Mentorship signup sheet that is emailed out weekly--several very experienced engineers open up 2+ hours of their calendar every week for office hours. Suggested uses for these office hours include:As an example, I used a technical mentorship office hour with Denis Yarats to remedy my deficiencies in systems programming knowledge. In half an hour, Denis walked me through the nuts and bolts of learn about mutexes, semaphores, deadlocks, concurrency, etc.Apart from these explicit forms of mentorship, Quora has a pervasive culture of learning that leads to a lot of informal mentorship. For instance, when I started working on notifications two months ago, I collaborated very closely with Stephanie Yuan (Stephanie Ho) , who showed me the ropes for the notification abstractions and walked me through many examples in code.Codelabs and Tech TalksQuora's codebase has a lot of cool abstractions such as webnode2 , LiveNode , and Persistent Finite State Machines. Much of the documentation for these abstractions and programming guidelines is contained in codelabs. New engineers will spent about half of their first week browsing through all of the basic codelabs along with the ones that will be relevant to future work.At the moment, there are 50 codelabs split between the categories of Product, Infrastructure, Abstraction, Data Infrastructure, Developer Tools, View Code, Speed, Internal Tools, Data, and Data Storage. To give you a sense of what the codelabs look like, here is a screenshot from our codelab on caching:Many codelabs will have suggested exercises for practice, and all of the codelabs will designate an engineer to contact for feedback or questions.Quora also has tech talks running alongside the self-paced codelabs during the engineering onboarding process. The tech talks cover things like git version control, unit testing, debugging tools, and information about Quora's server architecture. These talks will be scheduled even if there are only one or two new engineers joining a particular week. I think this is a good example of Quora's commitment to a smooth employee onboarding process.Organizational OnboardingA last component of the onboarding experience worth emphasizing is organizational onboarding. This means more than just the requisite couple of forms and paperwork. More broadly, it is important that every Quora employee understands Quora's mission and strategy. Towards this goal, the onboarding process also includesa meeting/orientation with our CEO, Adam D'Angelomeetings (both formal and ad-hoc) with managers and product managersa chance to introduce yourself a a fun fact) to the whole company at your first all-hands meetingI really felt home at Quora just a week into my onboarding as an intern last summer.The transition out of onboarding is practically invisible. One moment you're learning how to navigate Quora's codebase, the next moment you're working on a starter task, and the next moment you're writing a retrospective Quora answer about the onboarding experience!

If you’re looking for an employee onboarding software platform that allows you to do more than just electronic new hire paperwork, then consider my employer ExactHire’s solution—OnboardCentric.Admin users can easily invite new hires to complete a quick new employee profile via email, and then the new hire receives timely notifications to complete various aspects of the employee onboarding process (e.g. paperwork—including documents requiring electronic signature that you choose to upload as well as customizable forms, links to training information, reminders to connect with different people and aspects of the organization, etc.).The workflow is entirely customizable and you may have multiple different workflows based on the unique characteristics of different employees across your organization (e.g. location, employee level, exemption status, security clearance, etc.).You can check out our product demos here…and even use our pricing estimator tool to calculate monthly access fees.

The answer to this question will depend on the RPA system and what its capabilities are. For the answer below, I’ve assumed you’re talking about a full-service, customizable automation platform, including document management, electronic forms, RPA, and process mapping tools. With that kind of platform, you can see these HR-Onboarding related outcomes:Hiring WorkflowsGone are the days of manual hiring processes. Nowadays, job postings are found online, and prospective employees fill out applications that are actually customized electronic forms. From there, a specially designed processes dictates who will receive the application and what the next steps will be. HR process automation cuts down on the stacks of paper applications and résumés waiting for a hiring manager’s review.Further, when a person is hired, a workflow can be depended upon to make sure that person has all the information he or she needs, and also that the company has received all of the required documentation from him or her, including I-9 forms, W-4s, direct deposit forms, and more. The use of electronic documents in the hiring process can help eliminate data inconsistencies, and save time and money.Personnel Record StorageA foundational tool that comes with any RPA platform is Document Management Software. When a company is in a growth stage or is experiencing a high turnover rate, it produces a lot of paper. This can lead to high costs for storage, as well as time wasted filing applications, new hire paperwork, and more. Having HR document management software can make a huge difference because documents can be automatically “read” by an OCR tool and filed in the system electronically according to key data on each document.For example, Goodwill Industries of Middle Tennessee has a turnover rate of 35%, meaning that more than a third of their workforce is replace annually. Before implementing RPA within their HR department, Goodwill was juggling a surplus of paper and engaging in time-consuming, paper-based processes. After they switched from a paper-based system to RPA software, this non-profit company found that they’d reduced time spent on paperwork by 25%, and they were saving about $100,000 per year.Consistent New Hire TrainingOnce the hiring process is complete and a new employee is onboarded, he or she will have to go through on-the-job training. You might be wondering how something as human-centered as training could possibly be automated. Don’t think about it in terms of the delivery of actual one-on-one training. Human interaction cannot and should not be automated. What can be aided by RPA tools is the actual large-scale process. Imagine that a new hire, based on her department, has to go through general company training as well as 6 different sessions for her 3 major job duties. A specific workflow can be created that will prompt her at each new stage of her training. Further, as she completes each session, she can mark it as complete, creating an audit trail for her training.Or consider industries where employees have to be certified and complete steps each year to maintain their certification. If a nurse in your state is required to complete 30 hours of continuing education each year in order to maintain his certification, RPA tools can assist by sending reminders and other notifications, and the document management component can store proof of the completion of the continuing education courses. This also allows employees to take initiative when it comes to their own training and certifications.Other HR RPA OpportunitiesNot directly related to hiring, you can also apply RPA to these HR tasks. You can use RPA to map out and automate anything from PTO requests to benefits selections and employee reviews.