We’ll be joined by Erin ImHof, Human Resources Director at CertiK. She’s an HR expert with 17 years of experience across industries like technology, education, and manufacturing.
Erin will share her insights on how to create a welcoming and efficient onboarding experience, especially in remote work environments.
Whether you’re part of a small startup or a large organization, this episode is packed with practical advice to help you improve your onboarding process and set your new hires up for success.
Here’s what we’re going to cover in this episode:
- Meet our guest: Erin ImHof
- The importance of effective onboarding
- Challenges of onboarding in remote teams
- Proven strategies for successful onboarding
- Continuous improvement in the onboarding process
- Creating a Warm Welcome
You can also listen to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, Podchaser, Podcast Addict, Deezer, & all your favorite podcast platforms!
Meet our guest: Erin ImHof
Erin Rice: Welcome to the employee onboarding podcast where we are unpacking great
onboarding ideas and best practices from the world’s top HR practitioners and thought leaders. At Process Street, that starts with our mission to make work fun, fast, and faultless for teams everywhere.
My name is Erin Rice, and I’m the people and operations specialist here at Process Street. Today, I’m joined by Erin Imhoff. Erin has 17 years of experience in human resources in the technology, education, and manufacturing industry.
She enjoys working with remote teams and focusing on strategic and global HR employee engagement, project management, assessing and improving culture, and building great teams.
Erin has experience in all aspects of HR, including payroll, benefits, employee relations, system implementation, leaves of absence, talent acquisition, et cetera.
In her free time, Erin enjoys spending time with friends and family, taking care of her dog, cat, and bunnies, traveling, cooking, and enjoying the beach.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Erin.
Erin ImHof: Thank you, Erin. Nice to speak with you.
The importance of effective onboarding
Erin Rice: Before we dive in, I’d like to ask an icebreaker question. So I understand you have a little bit of a zoo at your house. And so I’m curious if you could add one more to the mix, what would you choose?
Erin ImHof: You know, it’s funny. I really wish I had a pot-bellied pig.
You know, we grew up in Oregon, so we always had a little bit of land, but you can grow up with a whole lot of animals: cats, dogs, birds, bunnies, fish, birds, everything you can think of, but I never had a pig. My parents would never let me. So really, in the future, I would love to have a little bit of land and add a pot-bellied pig who likes to roll in the mud.
Erin Rice: I love that! Well, great. I’m so glad to have you here. Thank you again for taking the time. And now, what we came here for: employee onboarding. So why don’t you start by sharing a little bit about your background and how you ended up where you are today?
Erin ImHof: Sure! I went to college and wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. My undergrad degree was in industrial and labor relations, so we touched a little bit on economics, labor studies, organizational behavior, and HR. And this was during the last recession.
And so I was trying to think, what can I do? You know, I don’t want to go to law school. So HR popped up as an opportunity. I fell into a great job working at Experian.
Then I began my journey working in education, manufacturing, but mostly technology companies.
So long winding road of 17 years, had a lot of fantastic experiences, and have been able to grow a lot in my career from supporting smaller businesses to supporting large companies on a global scale. I enjoy my current job so much.
Erin Rice: And so probably throughout your career, you’ve had a lot of experiences with being onboarded in addition to onboarding others.
Erin ImHof: That’s correct!
Challenges of onboarding in remote teams
Erin ImHof: You know, it’s funny, each experience is so different and it varies depending on the industry, if you’re in person or remote, the hiring manager, and the actual job itself. We didn’t have onboarding when I started in my current job. The first day was, “OK, here’s your laptop. What now? OK, figure it out!”
Erin Rice: Were you the one who sort of built all of that for your current company?
Erin ImHof: Yes, I started the HR department from the ground up.
So everything from the handbook to policies and procedures, implementing benefits, a new HR system, literally everything.
You know, it’s hard. We have been scaling so quickly in the past few years. I was employee number 54 and we were over 300 within a year. So I had to very quickly think about what we do to onboard employees successfully and let them know about the company.
So it was a lot of work. We had to design comprehensive orientation documentation for new hires, which meant we really had to figure out and lay out what CertiK does.
If you think of smart contract auditing in Web 3, most people are like, “What is that?” Including myself. So we wrote a comprehensive orientation, as I mentioned, that highlighted each team in there and what they did, who the team leaders were, a listing of all of our products and services, and then separately a complete benefits orientation.
We also listed out all of our benefits, which I just finished updating a new version this past weekend, just so people get a feel of what’s going on. One thing that I noticed was important with us demographically is we have a lot of employees who are newer college graduates, or this is their second career after graduation.
So they didn’t know a lot about benefits and that is so important, especially for new hires. They need to figure out what’s important to them if they have changing family situations if they get married, or have children.
And a lot of them would just pick our high deductible healthcare plan because it’s cheap. It’s $5 per month. But then they didn’t realize what the implications were. For example, I’m responsible for paying all the coverage up to $3,000 before the insurance kicks in.
That’s why new hire and benefits orientations are so important just to educate the new hires on what’s important to the company, what’s important to them to know coming into the organization, and how to help themselves with benefits.
Erin Rice: Yeah, we kind of forget about that sort of parental responsibility in HR, of handholding to teach them things that they don’t know about having a career.
Erin ImHof: Right, right. And also our company is very diverse. We have a lot of immigrants within our workforce.
So a lot of them had no clue about the American healthcare system. We created a separate presentation on: what the are benefits, what the are copays, what the are deductibles, breaking things down into bite-sized pieces.
Now they can understand as much as they can about our benefits and are open to talking to all of our new employees and current employees as well.
We just had our open enrollment presentation this past hour. So really, we’ve been continuing on that education, just making sure people understand what our offerings are. But it’s so important and it has to start with the onboarding process.
Erin Rice: Yeah, and we talk a lot about continuous improvement over the lifespan of an employee at any given point in their career, but that also includes their personal decisions that they have to make as well.
Erin ImHo: So true, and again, going back to onboarding you want to make sure that you cover as much as you can.
We’re even including things like harassment training, and ethics, we mandate diversity training, working in a remote setting as we’re all remote employees.
We do have an office in New York that people come into but maybe once a week if they’re in the tri-state area. But it’s so important just to build that foundation and let the employee know that “Hey, I’m walking into a company that knows what they’re doing! They want to make it a nice, easy transition for me.”
That was another challenge that we had. We were a startup, I mentioned I was employee 54. So we had people who were hired quickly based on their skill sets, and they quickly advanced in the company and were thrust into manager positions without any training.
So now you have someone who’s a manager, they’re trying to do their additional work and figure out how to hire and onboard new employees without any training.
It was a lot of work to train the managers to say, “Hey, this is how we need to work together and continually develop a successful onboarding program for them!”
There’s been a lot of iterations of what we’ve done so far. Trial and error, see what works, see what doesn’t work. And it varies per team, it varies per person. However, we wanted to have manager communication as an issue that was a challenge for us that we successfully overcame.
I remember we had a couple of interns start and we did our new hire orientation. And then they said, “Now what? We don’t know who our manager is. We don’t know what time we start. We don’t know what to do!”
That’s not the kind of onboarding experience you want someone to have on their first day. So we implemented something where we have the managers reach out to the new hires, whether they’re interns, consultants, or full-time employees ahead of time so they know.
“You’re starting at nine on Monday. You’re going to meet with HR for an hour, then you’ll meet with me, here’s my email address, we’ll make sure you’re added to Slack, and IT will connect with you.”
We’ve expanded the process, the employee knows what to expect the first day, and an hour-by-hour summary of what they’re doing. And we have that drafted out for about a week after they start, again, just so they know what they’re doing.
We ran into another situation where a manager was on vacation. One of their direct reports started and just sat there for about a week and did nothing because they didn’t know who to contact.
So it was very important to provide them with, you know: “These are your teammates. This is our org chart. If I’m unavailable, please contact this person.”
Again, a lot of trial and error. And I’m just using my current company as an example just because we grew so quickly in such a short amount of time that we ran into challenges that I hadn’t seen in other organizations.
Proven strategies for successful onboarding
Erin Rice: I bet being in cybersecurity, there’s probably a lot of compliance things that you have to pay attention to as well with onboarding. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Erin ImHof: Yeah! Obviously harassment training in certain states is a requirement, California, New York, and Washington. We make everyone take the strictest one.
As I mentioned, we add some additional pieces of training in diversity, working in a remote environment. Those are just us wanting to ensure that people can adapt to the culture of the company and adapt to the remote environment.
There’s a lot of other training for in Corrupt Practices Act. We’re ISO certified; just had a conversation about assigning more classes today. Basic cybersecurity training.
There’s a lot, and it’s constantly working with different departments from our compliance team to working with our internal IT team as well as DevOps just to make sure we’re covering everything.
We’re a global company, we have our headquarters in New York, we have contractors in Europe, and we have contractors throughout Asia.
It’s a lot of work to try to figure out what laws we have to abide by. How does GDPR effect us? There’s a lot of coordination with a lot of different departments and constant monitoring of laws and regulations to adapt quickly to things.
At the same time, we don’t want to overburden our employees by saying, “Hey, you have to take a week full of classes!,” when their managers are eager to get them in the door and working as soon as possible.
But at the same time, we want to ensure that we’re compliant and also give our new workers the best way to transition into the company so they know what to expect and to refresh those training annually or as needed.
Erin Rice: So if a new person came to you and said, “What advice would you give me to ramp and get to the point where I’m a contributor?,” What would be your advice to them?
Erin ImHof: Sit through the HR orientation, sit through the benefits orientation, and connect with your manager.
The one thing that we try to drive home here is the importance of one-on-one meetings. And realize this can be challenging.
Some of our managers may have 10-plus direct reports. So that may not happen on a weekly cadence. That may be a bi-weekly or even monthly cadence, depending on where they’re at, time zone challenges, workload, et cetera.
Connecting with the manager, making sure they’re attending all team meetings, really connecting with them, is important. We’re on pretty tight schedules here, so ensuring that they’re at work, they’re engaged.
We always encourage people to turn their cameras on just so they can see each other, get that nonverbal feedback, and reach out with questions. And most of our employees are engineers, and I mentioned a lot, are new to America.
Sometimes we have to kind of draw questions out of them or draw things out of them. But we want them to feel comfortable talking to their manager, talking to HR, whatever they need to speak to.
Making sure that they understand and are in a comfortable environment where they can speak up if they have questions. We don’t want people to fail. We want to hire someone here. We want them to be successful. We want them to have a good experience.
It’s really encouraging them to reach out. One thing we do on the HR side is we have a 30-day check-in -and we have a 90-day check-in with them. You know, just five, six questions.
And I’d say 99 % of the time the answers are positive, which is always great to see. But you know, people have valid criticisms or great ideas to add to us.
And we’ve been able to move our onboarding to suit their needs. “Why don’t we talk about this product this way? Why don’t we add a slide on our paid time off?”
So really, making people feel comfortable so they can share and we can learn from them on what worked at other companies.
Erin Rice: Yeah, for sure. I was going to ask about the feedback loop. So you use that 30-day check-in and that 90-day check-in to get some feedback directly from them.
Erin ImHof: Yeah, we reach out to them directly. We let them know that we will share their answers with their managers if they’re comfortable.
We want to make sure that, again, they can speak honestly with us. And we show them that we do take action based on their feedback.
During the whole employee experience here, we have had stay interviews, where we interview people directly. And let them know their answers will be aggregated. So if they have anything to say, it’s going to be bunched together by the team.
But we also have an open HR suggestion box. One thing I like about our company is we have a monthly all-hands meeting where our CEO gives updates on our direction, our strategy, and where we are going.
And, at the end, he has an open “ask me anything section” where people can submit anonymous questions in there. And there are some very direct and blunt questions, like, “Are we gonna have layoffs?” And he actually answers them.
We’ve focused on that feedback loop and saying we’re open for feedback and we’ve worked to train our managers to be open as well and to come back to HR to help them work through any challenges they may have. They can also go to their own manager or executive team leader to work out any challenges that they may have to go through.
So it’s really important to focus on not just someone’s onboarding, okay, they’re done. Now, we want to continue to follow up with them to make sure that they have a good experience the whole time they’re at CertiK.
Continuous improvement in the onboarding process
Erin Rice: How, what would you say is the length of time it takes a person to finish onboarding?
Erin ImHof: That’s going to vary so much by position.
We have a lot of engineers, we have a lot of smart contract auditors who have been doing it for a while. They can quickly jump in, do their audits, do what they need to do, look at the code, and are good.
In other positions, we just hired a project manager for a brand-new product. That onboarding is going to be a continual working process since we haven’t had that role before. So it depends on what their role is.
Normally, we like to see people kind of up and productive and ideally as soon as possible, realistically three to six months. It also depends on how much work experience they’ve had.
If they’re a fresh graduate or just learning, there’s obviously a learning curve there. And a lot of our employees are motivated and will work weekends or evenings to learn about what to do.
Some go back to school and obtain a certification, just to kind of keep going. But we see people active and working in that first week. We’ve been very, very lucky.
We do have very strict hiring criteria here to try and find the best people. A lot of referrals have worked out well for us. We try to hire the best just to make sure that people can jump in with both feet.
But on the HR side, as I mentioned, it’s so important to follow up with them just to make sure they’re still the right fit for the role for themselves and the company. It has to be fair on both sides.
Erin Rice: We’ve talked a lot about the pre-onboarding process. And that even starts a lot of times in the recruitment process. What is our hiring path, our interview path? And how are we vetting this person?
When I joined Process Street, that was a little bit overwhelming for me when I got there on the first day. There was such a high level of trust because the process works.
The recruitment process is in place to vet you before your first day. On day one, you have all this trust, but coming from a background in education where every ounce of my trust was earned, it was strange when I was given trust on a silver platter.
But I’m talking to more and more companies learning that’s because the recruitment process works.
Erin ImHof: It does. It takes a long time to develop our talent acquisition strategies.
We’ve gone through a lot of changes with SIRDEC in the past couple of years. And we’ve had a fantastic HR team where recruiters developed a very comprehensive strategy. And as you know, the challenging thing is, it varies per position, it varies per team.
However, the goal is to get everyone on the same page, which is challenging in a company where each team functions like its own business unit.
I know in other places I’ve worked, this is a recruiting process, this is how it is. The main difference might be just based on the position. But in teams that function in different business units, it’s a little bit more challenging because you’re not gonna have the same process.
So it was creating different processes for each team. But as to your point, the most important thing is to make sure that we hire the right person. And I mean, we’ve identified candidates that we thought were a great fit for us.
At the same time, we want to make sure it’s a great fit for them and they have room to grow and add value to the company and are happy here. So it’s so important to start by clearly crafting that job description.
What do we want? What do we need? When I first started, I remember looking at some of the job descriptions and they were like three pages long. They wanted that purple unicorn. It’s like, okay, well, let’s be realistic here.
We want to hire someone who has a skill set but also is a match to fit in with the team. That’s absolutely huge because some of our skills can be taught.
So really focusing on that job description, just get what you want. And then identifying those soft skills as well. That is hard in a remote setting, making sure that person’s a fit, especially when you may never meet them in person. Then setting the screening questions in the talent acquisition.
Making sure we can quickly identify the top resumes and then go through the actual interview process, making sure that we include all relevant stakeholders in there, like the hiring manager and coworkers.
We found that was very important because previously they were just doing the hiring manager and then boom, done, you’re hired. We want to make sure they’re a fit with the team.
They need to talk with other teammates. What are you working on? Types of products? What are the deadlines? We want to make sure it’s a good fit there. And then have a member of the executive leadership team for that business unit to make sure that they’re an overall fit, and have more of a casual conversation as well.
So it’s a pretty comprehensive process. Some teams even do coding challenges or projects dependent on the role. So there are several rounds of our interviewing process. Then obviously reference check, and background check after the offer is made.
It starts well ahead of time, as you mentioned.
Erin Rice: I would guess that that takes a while. But then once it’s done, everybody’s confident with the decision that’s been made.
Erin ImHof: Yes, our voluntary turnover rate is very low within the company. I’m actually reading the numbers tomorrow. But last time we looked, it was probably around 4%.
You know, it’s a very thorough process at the beginning. One thing we don’t have here is set metrics on hiring time, which I purposely did not want and our CEO agreed. I would rather spend more time hiring the right person than just firing a person who turned out later they weren’t the right fit.
So we’ve had positions that open for three, four, five months because we weren’t quite sure about the person in the role. But once they’re filled, the turnover is very low.
Creating a warm welcome
Erin Rice: That’s amazing! And I love the point that you made earlier about making sure it’s a mutual fit. You’re not just looking for the right person. You’re helping the right person pick you as well.
Erin ImHof: Exactly. We don’t want to hire someone again just to have a body here and have them be miserable. If that’s not fair to them, their output’s not going to be great and we don’t want anyone to be miserable.
We want our employees happy and, if they’re a better fit in a different type of organization, maybe not a startup, maybe a bigger company, then that person needs to go to work for them. So we want it to be a two-way street.
Erin Rice: This has been so great! Before we go, I have one last question I’d like to end on, which is: how do you think companies can create a wow moment for their new person?
Erin ImHof: They can have a fun experience by doing a lot of different things.
It varies so much if you’re onsite or in person. When I’ve worked in onsite jobs previously, it’s that introduction to the team, going out to lunch, and just having the boss be there and motivated.
Right now at CertiK, we like to send employees a whole welcome basket. Here’s some coffee, here’s some cookies, here’s some swag, a shirt, a hat, and a mug. Just letting them know that we want them to feel welcome.
And then we also send out welcome blurbs and we do introductions in our all-hands meetings as well. So really letting people know, “Hey, we just hired this person on our DevOps team!”
We do this to make them feel welcome within the company and then encourage managers to do the same thing.
Having virtual team lunches when someone starts or breakfast, depending on the time zone, and just introducing them to the team just so they get a good feel of how they’ll fit into the company.
So just not having it be presentations and emails, but taking that time to get to know them and bringing that humanistic element to it.
Erin Rice: Absolutely! And creating that warm fuzzy feeling it sounds like too. Well, thank you again, Erin, for your time today. I appreciate it. This has been so insightful. And I’m sure our listeners will enjoy all of your nuggets of information.
Erin ImHof: Thank you so much, Erin. It’s been great speaking with you!
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