Onboarding is incredibly important at GitLab. We don't expect you to hit the ground running from day one.
We highly recommend taking at least two full weeks for onboarding and only in week three starting with team specific onboarding and training. Please feel free to participate in your team's work in your first two weeks, but don't feel like you have to contribute heavily.
All onboarding steps are in the onboarding issue template which is owned by the People Experience Team. The onboarding process for the new team member is self-driven and self-learning, whilst also remaining as asynchronous as possible settling into the remote life at GitLab.
At GitLab we take great pride in dogfooding our own product, that is why all onboarding tasks are completed in a GitLab issue. First of all, what is an issue? You can learn more about what an issue is here.
The People Experience Associate assigned to the team members specific onboarding will open the onboarding issue at least 4 days prior to the hire date.
Each onboarding issue has a main section that contains tasks relevant to all GitLab team-members and a due date of 30 days. Below the main section are department and role-specific tasks. Some roles and departments have tasks that link to a supplemental issue template or an additional onboarding page. Reach out to your onboarding buddy or other GitLab team members if you need help understanding or completing any of your tasks.
Through onboarding issues, you should gain access to our team member baseline entitlements. On Day 2 of onboarding an Access Request will be generated, if a template has been created for the role. Access requests are owned by the IT team. If you have any access requests related questions, please reach out to #it-help in Slack.
In certain instances, the People Experience team may not be able to assist with onboardings due to a national holiday or Family and Friends Day. These specific dates are documented in the People Experience team Handbook page.
The People Experience Team hosts a pre-onboarding call known as the Ta-New-Ki call (a play on the abstract Tanuki i.e. Japanese raccoon dog you will find in our logo). The purpose of this call, which is hosted in Zoom, is to give soon to onboard team members the chance to meet / socialise and to provide an opportunity to ask any lingering questions ahead of their start date. Internally we refer to this as an AMA (Ask Me Anything) call. This call is open to all current team members, hiring managers.
This call occurs every two weeks on Thursday at two times to account for timezones.
08:30 AM PT
Please note that this call will take a place a week or two before your actual start date.
General Topics Covered
As a way to create a connection and social element from day one, all new team members from the specific hiring month will be added to a Slack channel. This will be linked to the Donut Watercooler App, which prompt different questions for team members to answer weekly on a Thursday. These questions will also be used as a general onboarding check-in. The channel will also be used to communicate any important notifications pertinent to new hires, as well as reminders of the onboarding check-in call and "#donut-be-strangers" Slack channel.
To be more inclusive to all team members across the world and embracing our bias towards asynchronous communication, the onboarding cohorts has been created async.
By default, all new team members are added to the below Slack channels from day 1 to ensure that they are able to ask any questions or for assistance in the correct channels upfront:
An issue is created for new team members at least 4 business days prior to their start date. The Manager and a People Experience Associate will be assigned to this issue. Managers, People Experience and IT Ops all have tasks that need to be completed prior to the start date to ensure a smooth and successful onboarding process. For questions or help with any of these tasks feel free to reach out in the issue by mentioning @people-exp or adding a question in the #people-connect Slack channel.
The People Experience Associate completes a monthly audit of all open onboarding issues to ensure that the new team member, manager and People Experience team tasks are completed. More importantly, there are certain tasks which need to be completed in line with our company compliance (security, payroll, etc).
If any tasks are still outstanding, the People Experience Associate will ping the relevant members on the issue requesting action on the items or checking whether the issue can be closed.
It remains the responsibility of the People Experience Associate to close the issue and remain compliant.
The employment bot will automatically close any onboarding issues still open after 60 days.
First of all, what is an issue? You can learn more about what an issue is here.
To ensure a successful completion of the onboarding issue, it is important that all tasks are checked off, whether the task is applicable to the onboarding team member or not. Checking the box indicates one of the following:
These templates are used by the People Experience team to onboard new team members.
These are added to the "All Team Member" Template
