Onboarding at AutoScout24 in Türkiye
Aziz Ünsal · June 19, 2023 · 3 min read
I joined AutoScout24 in March of 2023 and would like to write about my onboarding journey at the Istanbul office. First, I need to say that it was way ahead of my expectations!
On the first day, I received my laptop as well as other equipment. A colleague from “Employee Tech” supported me in configuring the hardware and my accounts so that I had access to my email, Slack, Jira, Confluence (the company Wiki), Miro, GitHub, AWS, and other tools. Now I was ready to go!
Our engineering manager, Güven, welcomed me and walked me through the onboarding roadmap in a Miro board. Shortly afterwards, my new team members invited me to further team-specific onboarding sessions, like team routines and processes, or technical details of the services which the team is responsible for.
These sessions were fun because I didn’t feel that my colleagues were merely giving the sessions out of a sense of obligation, but rather because they enjoyed it. These sessions felt like a two-way communication and gave me a save space for questions. I asked many questions about specific topics during and after the session, and my new colleagues were happy to answer. They even offered to repeat the session if I wanted to.
For me, one important aspect of a good onboarding is high-quality documentation. If I want to dive deep into a topic in a self-paced way, I can then look at diagrams in Miro, learn from documentation in Confluence, or read the code in GitHub. I noticed that transparency is an important principle at AutoScout24. I could see the team’s plan for my onboarding process. I felt less stressed than at other companies.
The first few weeks after joining a new company are usually quite intense: there are so many new things to learn, new people to meet, and new products and processes to take in. At AutoScout, if I felt overwhelmed or didn’t know the right person to talk to, I could always turn to my “onboarding buddy”! My buddy, Selma, helped by easing the whole process for me and was always helping me out when I am stuck.
As an engineer, I believe it is always good to get your hands dirty! As a new joiner it is hard to decide when to begin a task, but when your team is ready to integrate you like in my team in AutoScout24, it is not a problem! My colleague Josef encouraged me to take a look at the team’s board and to pick a task that I felt comfortable with and explained me what to do. And that is how I started implementing my first task!
As I said above, this is a two-way process; after the first month we reviewed the onboarding process and improved a few tiny things. I really enjoy this attitude to get better every day!
All in all, it is a great experience to start at AutoScout24.
