There are many approaches to onboarding a new employee—from the meticulously structured strategy to “Go find an open desk somewhere”—which means there are many different ways onboarding can, without care, fall short. To better understand different onboarding strategies, HR Brew is asking organizations to talk us through their onboarding process.

The first thing to know about GitLab is that it’s not the type of company that skimps on the details. Kyle Wiebers, manager of engineering productivity at the open-source software development operations platform, smiled on our recent video call when he mentioned the 2,000+-page employee handbook.

“Our handbook is quite the resource,” Wiebers said.

Devin Rogozinski, GitLab’s senior director of talent, brand, and engagement, calls the onboarding documentation a “roadmap” with everything an employee needs “all in one place that you can go back to and reference over time.”

As far as roadmaps go, it’s less like directions you’d get from a parent (“turn right at the tall building”), and more like the guidance you’d expect from a sophisticated GPS. As a fully remote company with over 1,500 geographically distributed employees, Rogozonski said that the detail is by design; GitLab needs to “document a bit more.”

There is no guarantee that a new hire will live in the same location or even the same time zone as their manager or onboarding buddy (an employee assigned to help the new hire acclimate to GitLab). For onboarding to run smoothly, Rogozinski said the process must be “as self-service as possible, while at the same time making sure there’s support if questions come up.”

In practice, Rogozonski admitted that it’s a hard balance to strike—if employees spend too much time reading documents, the company could seem “less welcoming” than others. Keep reading here.—SV

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In May, just ahead of National Recruiter Day, LinkedIn released several new features on its recruiter portal intended to make recruitment easier and more organized.

The social networking platform for professionals is attempting to make it easier for recruiters to find the best candidates based on skill and manage their workflows more easily. But while LinkedIn remains, for many, a valuable resource for finding the right candidates, some recruiters told HR Brew it still has limitations, despite the new improvements.

But first, what’s new? In a blog post announcing the updates, LinkedIn said it’s seen “an 11x increase in global demand for recruiters relative to the May 2020 low point.” And with 11.4 million open jobs in the US as of the end of April, recruiters are under pressure to fill positions as quickly as possible.

The latest LinkedIn Recruiter features include updates to Recommended Matches, bringing “the most qualified and interested candidates based on your hiring activity” and allows recruiters to search candidates based on skills, as employers focus less on aspects like education requirements. Another feature enables users to source internal candidates more easily, which could be helpful with retention as one recent Pew Research Center survey showed that a third of employees who quit their jobs cited a lack of career advancement opportunities as their main reason for leaving.

Brian Gabay, the owner of a recruitment service in New York City, told HR Brew that the standout feature for him is the new ability to organize his inbox by project. He said that external recruiters are busy juggling projects for multiple clients and verticals. “When you’re creating these projects, and being able to filter through inboxes tied to those projects—that for me specifically in my team has been really helpful,” he said.

Zoom out. Despite the new features, Gabay said he doubts LinkedIn will ever match up to what recruiters can handle with an automated tracking system (ATS), which offers “automated and speedy features to hit a lot of [candidates] at once. Because at the end of the day…it’s who gets to that person first,” and speed and volume are sometimes what help a recruiter beat the competition.

And aside from ATS, LinkedIn isn’t the only social media platform that recruiters are turning to for good talent these days. Keep reading here.—KP

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @Kris10Parisi on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Kristen for her number on Signal.

As employers fervently search for ways to increase engagement among their hybrid and remote workforces, some are turning to virtual reality, the simulated space where employees can “gather” for a wide range of activities ranging from business meetings to mini-golf.

Though workplace participation in the metaverse is still in its early stages, advocates for the tech say it can make a big difference in alleviating feelings of isolation that some remote employees may be grappling with. This week, Marketing Brew’s Alyssa Meyers explored some of the ways some marketing agencies are now using VR to complement their remote or hybrid workplaces.

“The technology allows us to connect in ways better than having the bat phone in the middle of the conference table and everybody shouting into it,” Simeon Edmunds, SVP and creative director of Mediahub’s R+D Lab, told Marketing Brew.

Bret Starr, founder and CEO of B2B marketing agency The Starr Conspiracy, said an employee survey during the pandemic revealed that although his staff liked working from home, some “reported feeling disconnected from colleagues and occasional feelings of isolation.” So, his company spent over $50,000 to make Oculus headsets available to all employees.

Now, “probably 10% of our agency is in the metaverse at any given time,” Starr told Marketing Brew, adding that employees use VR for work meetings and social activities like baby showers, which typically happened over Zoom during the pandemic. “We now do those in the metaverse, and they’re much more engaging and fun,” Starr said.

And marketing software company Wistia, which is still “predominantly” remote, Alyssa reported, decided to spend some of its budget normally earmarked for in-person company culture activities on Oculus headsets for all 180 employees.

Wistia co-founder and CEO Chris Savage believes an organization’s leaders should “find the thing in your company where you can let people experiment with how they spend time together and how they connect.”

“If you’re not doing that, you’re missing out,” he added.

For more on VR in the workplace, read Alyssa’s full story right here on Marketing Brew.—JDS

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: 56% of tech professionals said in a recent survey they would quit their jobs if their employer recorded audio and/or video of them through their computer monitors. (Morning Consult)

Quote: “If you had a person vouching for a company, that’s going to speak a lot louder than a recruiter coming in and just posting a job and saying, ‘We’re looking for diverse talent.’”—Greg Greenlee, founder of the Slack group Blacks in Technology, which is part of a growing network of professionals using Slack to make professional connections. (the Wall Street Journal)

Read: Quitting a job with a $450,000 annual salary because the boredom was too much to handle? That’s the experience of software engineer Michael Lin, who quit his high-paying job at Netflix for precisely that reason. (Insider)