Recruiting Graduates #5: The Induction

I’m not sure how many people we offered jobs to during the recent recruitment drive, but 3 new Graduate Software Developers have started. We have never had a good induction process – we usually just expect people to start working on Day 1, but people won’t be familiar with our software, and the process.

Additionally, we always supply people with a stock laptop that could have been given to anyone in the business; so it doesn’t come with any development tools at all. So you need to install Visual Studio, SQL Server, and a few other things. However, these days, our IT has ramped up the security so now you cannot install anything without them remoting on to type in the administrator password, thus exacerbating the poor induction experience.

I wasn’t involved in creating the Induction process, the group of Senior Developers and Testers in India somehow went ahead without us in the UK. 

They decided to use a Kanban board to track the tasks for the new recruits. They created tasks for each aspect like “Laptop configuration”, “Agile process overview”, “C# basics” and many others that made sense to me. The kanban idea was a good way of tracking their progress but it already seemed messy with 3 new starters but there’s more coming. I suggested that they use “Swimlanes” which can split the board into sections which can be used per person, but for some reason they rejected my idea in favour of their disorganised mess. So if there’s 10 tasks for each person, there’s 30 tasks that were initially on the backlog, and as they move to In Progress/Done, you cannot really tell how far each person is through the scheme without using additional filters, or configuring colours. Then when more new starters join, it becomes a complete mess with 10 more tasks being added.

I felt some of the tasks weren’t mandatory for the induction. One of them was Automation. Some developers in some teams are involved with automation, but it is usually given to the Software Testers. I think there’s different types of automation depending on the team you are in. The Seniors listed several types of automation, and provided links to LinkedIn Learning or Youtube – courses that were sometimes a few hours, but some were up to 8 hours. Then some were C# based, some were Java based, and some were Python based (it included JMeter, Selenium, Behave, PACT, Python, General automation). So you had to learn the base languages as a prerequisite.

“the videos are short, many around 7 hours, some are 1 hour”

Indian Senior Tester

When I saw that they had created a task that could potentially last 50 hours and wasn’t required for the job, I voiced my opposition to this idea and Becky, a Senior Tester agreed with me.

I said they aren’t going to learn if they are just watching videos, and won’t remember which is which. The constant switching of programming languages will probably hinder their retention. It’s very boring with the amount we are asking to do. This “Automation” learning task would already take a month to do if you are actually going to follow along and experiment with it. Then you have all the other induction tasks which involve reading, watching videos, and installing more software.

Becky pointed out we don’t even use this type of Automation in our particular teams so we shouldn’t ask them to do it. But then they said we “want to train them just in case it is used in the future“. We said we could just train them when it was needed, but they insisted it should be part of the Induction. Becky could sense they weren’t gonna back down so she asked that we inform them about which teams use automation and how often it is used so they can make their own judgement to learn it. They replied

“why should we inform them? we don’t want to set the expectation that they won’t ever use them”.

Indian Senior Tester

Towards the end of the meeting, he then said the new employees have already given feedback on the process. He said that all three agreed that:

“it’s hard to concentrate with all the videos we want them to watch, and all the reading we want them to do”.

Indian Senior Tester

Let me get this right. I said there was far too much for them to watch, and he argued with me about its importance, and then he said they have already complained about that exact problem, and they had only been here a week. Brilliant.