Onboard new data team hires

Something we often hear from our data champions is that they’re #hiring! We also know it’s common practice for team members to move around internally as they pick up new responsibilities or shift to new teams.

Adding new team members to help your company accomplish big objectives is exciting, but making sure your new employees and lateral hires have a fantastic onboarding experience can be challenging. It can be even more challenging for new folks to navigate your data environment and find what they need to make an impact on your organization.

To solve this challenge, our amazing DataOps champions started leveraging Atlan as a data handbook with the aim to help onboard both new hires and existing team members who move into new roles.

Learnings

Prerequisites: Give them the tools they need

  • Set up new hires and lateral movers in Atlan ahead of time so they can access what they need from day one. This solves for the first-week rush to share files right after someone joins.
  • Set the right access policies in Atlan so new hires can get the data they need. When new colleagues join, you don’t want to spend time writing unique onboarding instructions. Mirror colleagues' policies in Atlan so they have access to the relevant assets.
💡 Top tip Don't stress about sharing sensitive data with new hires. By leveraging Atlan’s access policies, you can control who has access to what.

Help them understand the business language

Give new hires access to the business glossary. Your new teammates come from all types of diverse backgrounds. Along the way, they might have worked in organizations that define some things differently than you do. Your new team will also want to understand how your organization defines important business terminology and metrics so that they have the context they need to use your data correctly.

For example, if Lucy, a new teammate wanted to understand how you calculate "Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)", she will be able to find it easily in your metrics glossary.

💡 Top tip Defining terms clearly and categorizing your definitions in your glossary will make it easy for everyone, not just new hires, to navigate your data assets.

Help them find the right data and data friends (owners/experts)

  • It can be difficult for new hires to orient themselves on their team and across your organization. They might be wondering where they should be spending their time and what their colleagues are doing.
  • Curate verified data assets (tables, dashboards, saved queries, etc.) that are core to your team so that your new teammate can easily search, discover, and use the right data asset. To a new person joining the team, that helps build trust with the team and feel confident in their ability to add value. It also helps them figure out the relevant person to reach out to in case of questions.

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