Read the exact onboarding guide GitLab uses to manage its fully remote, 1,200-person staff and ensure new hires thrive from day one

• DevOps platform GitLab is one of the largest fully remote companies in the world.
• If you've had to pivot to onboarding remotely amid the coronavirus pandemic, Darren Murph, GitLab's head of remote, recommended documenting every part of the process, making it entirely comprehensive, and instilling core values from the get go.
• GitLab's extensive onboarding documents are open source and available to the public.
• You can use their process as an outline for onboarding your own new team members effectively and efficiently.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

For companies that are hiring as usual - or even more so - during the COVID-19 pandemic, getting a candidate from application to interview to signed offer is no small feat.

But it's also only step one. How, exactly, do you onboard someone when you can't show them around the office and introduce them to the team?

Take some tips from a 1,200-employee company spread across 67 countries and regions that's been fully remote since its founding in 2011 - that's how.

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GitLab, the DevOps platform that's been named to Forbes' 'Cloud 100' list of the best private cloud companies in the world - and is one of the largest fully remote companies in the world - has made its onboarding process (and entire employee handbook) completely public and open source, so that any company can learn from it.

"Part of GitLab's legacy is going to be, how do we influence the proliferation of remote-first and all-remote companies in the world?" Darren Murph, GitLab's head of remote, who's charged with helping employees acclimate to remote work, told Business Insider. "We firmly believe that the more of these companies that exist, the rising tide lifts all boats."

To that end, Murph has been spending much of his time these days sharing advice with newly remote companies. If you're onboarding employees virtually for the first time, here are his best tips.

Make sure every step of the process is documented

"Offload as much of the burden from people and on to documentation as you possibly can," recommended Murph. "Sometimes we have 40 or 50 people joining in a week. If we did not have a prescriptive onboarding that was all documented ... this would be a scaling nightmare."

It's something the company has prioritized since its early days. "Even when the company was about 10 people, [CEO Sid Sijbrandij] and the founding team had the notion that we should document everything that matters to us right now," said Murph.

As a result, the onboarding process is now an incredibly detailed guide, including specific tasks for IT ops, people operations, payroll, and the hire's manager and "onboarding buddy" to do before day one to ensure the new employee has all the tools, systems, and information they need to get started.

Take the time to make the onboarding process comprehensive

Once an employee starts, they have their own set of tasks to get set up with systems and start learning about GitLab, broken down by what they should complete each morning and afternoon.

"The first two weeks [of an employee's time] are essentially no work at all, and we're adamant about that," said Murph. As the handbook specifically states, "We highly recommend taking at least two full weeks for onboarding and only in week three starting with team-specific onboarding and training."

After the company-wide onboarding, each role has its own set of onboarding to-dos. The whole process lasts about four weeks, said Murph.

While the process might seem too long for managers who are eager to get their new employees up to speed, Murph said that giving an employee time to digest the company's values, figure out how work is done, and get up to speed properly is a competitive advantage because so many companies don't take the time to do onboarding at all. "It's the foundation of how this person is going to impact your company for years to come," he explained.

Be deliberate about incorporating values into the process

One of the tasks all new team members must complete is reading through GitLab's company values and sub-values.

"The beautiful thing about GitLab's values is it's more than six words. It's thousands of words that explain how you can exemplify a value in a remote setting," said Murph. "We have to be very prescriptive about: How do we live a value?"

For example, one of the sub-values of "Collaboration" is "Negative Feedback is 1-1." The handbook states exactly how that looks in an employee's daily remote life.

Going fully remote is actually a great time to define your company or team's values - and if your day-to-day behaviors, meeting, and communication styles reflect them. "Honestly, your colocated culture is probably based on who's the biggest charisma or the loudest voice in the room, and that's a terrible way to define your culture," said Murph.

He recommended that managers take time to write down what it's really like to work at your company. "And if it's not what you want, you need to change your values to get it where you want it," he explained.

Set everyone up with a buddy

GitLab's onboarding tasks include getting set up on Slack and scheduling Zoom calls with new team members to ensure social connections, but Murph emphasized the need to also set people up with an onboarding buddy.

"You may not have time to write out a document for onboarding issues, but the very least you can hook somebody up with a mentor, give them their Zoom chat, and just let them be there as a one-on-one point of contact to help acclimate them to the company," he said.

How do you pick the right buddy? Murph said that GitLab leaves it up to the discretion of the manager, but typically recommends the buddy has at least three, and ideally more than six months, of experience at the company.

In addition, the buddy should be someone who's not on the same team, but someone who can complement their knowledge base in some way.

"For example, I was an onboarding buddy for a designer, but still within marketing," said Murph. "We are both familiar with marketing, but she does design and I do other things, so there's some commonalities but some differences, so we can help each other with our POV."

Iterate and get feedback as needed

GitLab's onboarding process has changed as the company has scaled, and continues to. The onboarding process specifically asks new employees to take action to fix missing or confusing information in the handbook, as well as to offer feedback on the process.

A recent piece of feedback that resulted in a change? One new hire mentioned she missed the social interaction of a traditional onboarding experience with other new hires. Now, managers ask new employees if they need more social interaction and, if so, prompt them to create a virtual chat with other new employees each morning and afternoon.

"Two weeks into the job, and [a new employee] is able to fundamentally change how this entire company does onboarding," said Murph. "That is the most empowering way I could ever start thinking to start your tenure at a company."

Overall, though, employee feedback is resoundingly positive, Murph said. He explained that employees especially appreciate that everyone has visibility into everyone else's process.

"No matter what level in the company, we all go through the same onboarding, so we can work already unified," he said. "Everyone is going through the same thing."