It was a Sunday. I know I shouldn’t be working. It was wrong. And after more than 10 grueling hours of putting the entire site up, my nose bled – literally.
I was obsessing over how to better indoctrinate and onboard new hires in SEO Hacker. Jim Collins’ book Built to Last taught me that clock building (visionary) companies used indoctrination to preserve the core beliefs and values of the company and from that core, they steer in the right directions to stimulate progress.
The importance of preserving the core is extremely high. The HP way has built a lasting company that is still quite bullish in the tech industry today. Merck is still Merck even though it is 126 years old this year. The case is the same for 129 year old Johnson and Johnson – and the list goes on.
SEO Hacker is something that I’m really passionate about. I want it to grow and flourish and have its own established product someday. I want it to be a visionary company. And the step I took was to build a system that would indoctrinate new hires (and even the current team) – the mistake: I did it all in one day.
Working on the site
I put up a subfolder in our SEO Services site and made it the destination of our onboarding system. It’s located at https://seo-hacker.net/growth as of now I’ve named it the SEO Hacker Internal Onboarding site.
I installed WordPress, bought Sensei by WooCommerce and bought Scholar which is a Wootheme for Sensei. It cost me quite a considerable sum.
It took some tweaking to make the homepage picture of us work on top of the Photoshop editing I did to make it darker. Then I went to work and made sure that people won’t be able to just login unless they are part of the SEO Hacker team.
The entire onboarding system is now online and working and is triggered by a hidden email subscription form (which I will not disclose here). The email form is where we put in the first name and email of the new hire and it would send them a welcoming email that includes the instructions of what to do in the SEO Hacker Internal Onboarding site.
The entire onboarding is systematized by the Sensei plugin. New hires won’t be able to proceed to the next lesson without completing the current lessons they are in. They can only take one lesson at a time. Plus there are quizzes they need to take – and pass. If they fail, they get stuck and I would need to review their progress.
It’s awesome to know that all our new hires from now on will be able to go through the entire onboarding process for sure – which includes our employee handbook, mission/vision statement, history, tools and access, and the fundamentals of SEO.
It takes a huge load off my back and off the back of my HR personnel. So I was really quite happy with the work I’ve done. Unfortunately, it might’ve been too much for me.
My nose is alright now but I feel tired and I actually got sick with mild cough and cold. I sure hope this doesn’t go any further. In any case, I’m glad that we have a perpetual system that helps us indoctrinate and teach new hires and track the progress of each person.
