Редакція dev.ua Work 2 October 2026, 15:48

The first 30 days in the company: how SharksCode builds onboarding for newcomers

The first 30 days do not give a final answer as to whether a person will stay in the company. But they are the ones that largely shape his attitude towards the new place. And the first strong signal is given by the company even before the newcomer completes his first task. If his day begins with searching for documents, waiting for equipment and correspondence for access, it quickly becomes clear that no one prepared for his arrival.

SharksCode adheres to a different principle: onboarding does not begin on the first day of work, but long before. Therefore, on the first morning, a person should not deal with organizational routine, but understand their goals, team, and next steps.

How we cleaned up the chaos from the early days

When the company is small, many decisions can indeed be based on the memory, experience, and personal involvement of individual people. But as you grow to over 400 specialists, manual heroism ceases to scale. What used to be solved with a few messages gradually turns into chaos, delays, and additional costs. And here you can endlessly add people to support an inefficient process, or you can honestly disassemble and rebuild it once.

Therefore, we transformed onboarding into a managed system with clear goals, responsibilities, milestones, and metrics. In fact, we began to treat it like a product: we defined the user, their needs, key touchpoints, and the result we wanted to achieve in the first 30 days.

Everything that is not related to the job itself must be resolved before the first working day. It all starts with an offer, which we do not sign without a release date. It immediately fixes the format of the work and the goals for the probationary period. Thanks to this, important agreements do not remain somewhere between the recruiter, HR, manager and the phrase "I thought we had already agreed on that."

The work format tells you what to prepare. We send equipment to a remote employee in advance so that it can arrive on the first day, and for a hybrid format, a workplace is waiting in the office. Meanwhile, HR knows about the newcomer long before he leaves. Thanks to the planned vacancy schedule and regular meetings, he sees who is about to join the team, and already creates tickets for sysadmins for all accesses. The person is immediately taken to the right point in the structure, so from the first day he knows his functional and administrative manager.

We also do not postpone legal registration for later. For the hybrid format, documents are signed in the office on the first day, for the remote format — through "Vchazno" with electronic signatures. Therefore, geography does not affect the quality of the process. And about a week before the start, People Partner gets acquainted with the newcomer. The person has not yet started work, but already knows who to contact with questions.

Meet the manager and get straight to business

The first day at SharksCode begins with an introduction to the manager. Then the new specialist immediately immerses himself in onboarding. Alongside HR and managers, our AI agents work here, telling about the company. The AI assistant Akulina takes on most of the routine, freeing HR from time-consuming tasks that do not require human involvement.

At the start, the newcomer also receives Sharkcoins for our internal marketplace and can immediately choose something for themselves. It’s a small detail, but onboarding consists not only of documents, accesses, and checklists. It also consists of signals that show the person: they were expected here and they are welcome here.

How does a person get into the rhythm of a team?

Further, the adaptation moves along two parallel tracks. At the general level, a person gets acquainted with the company’s policies and internal processes — from security to the rules of working with code. At the functional level, he immerses himself in his tasks, goals and the work of the team. Progress is reflected in the PeopleForce checklist, where the newcomer independently marks the completed stages and sees what awaits him next.

In parallel, the process is monitored by the same People Partner who got to know the person before the start. They have a clear schedule of meetings, and automatic reminders help not to miss the necessary point of contact. The system makes sure that nothing is lost, but the conversation itself remains with the person. At the end of the trial period, the manager joins them, and the results are discussed by the three of them.

We don’t evaluate a new hire in a vacuum or draw conclusions after one bad day. We look at the first month’s tasks, the completion of key milestones, the manager’s feedback, and the quality of the onboarding process itself. If something doesn’t work, we analyze not only the employee’s actions, but also how clearly the goals were set, how the manager worked, and whether the system gave the person everything they needed to get started.

Data helps us structure the assessment and remove some of the subjectivity. But the final decision is not made by a checklist, a metric, or an AI agent — it is made by a person who sees the context. For us, mature onboarding is not about maximum automation. It is a system in which technology, the manager, the People Partner, and the newcomer understand their roles and work towards a common result.