When Dmitri Essiounine joined Roblox in 2016, the online gaming platform had just 103 employees, a number that made it feasible for each engineering team to have its own onboarding process. Six years later, he said, it employs ~1,600 and counting, and standardization has become the name of the game.

Essiounine, director of engineering at Roblox, said the company grew so quickly in this period that sometimes new hires would join a team before it had developed robust “best onboarding practices.” To ensure each new hire was set up for success, no matter their manager, he said, Roblox chose to standardize the onboarding curriculum across the entire department.

Online or in-person boot camp is now the centerpiece of engineers’ onboarding experience at Roblox and is designed to fill any knowledge gaps that might exist between new hires and their managers and mentors.

New hires complete two “tracks,” for which senior-level employees volunteer to teach courses related to their expertise. The first covers “common core” topics relevant to all engineers, such as security, privacy, and the basics of building Roblox games. Managers assign their direct reports to a second track based on their roles, whether back-end or front-end development.

Essiounine conceded that having new hires sit through two tracks of boot camp is “a little bit more costly,” but he thinks it’s “worth investing in people up front.”

“The mentors would have to [have] the same conversations with their mentees anyway,” Essiounine pointed out. Standardized onboarding, he said, can give time back to managers and mentors and provide some peace of mind knowing everyone has the fundamentals.

We talked to Essiounine and a recent engineering hire, Jun Jang, about the experience of completing such an involved boot camp. Keep reading here.—SV

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.

Here’s one side effect of the remote work revolution: When employees work remotely full-time, they tend to get laid off remotely too. Perhaps you’ve noticed that layoffs administered over Zoom (Better.com) or job offers rescinded en masse over email (Coinbase) have been making headlines since the pandemic began. And just last month, online auto dealer Carvana laid off 2,500 employees, some of whom were notified over Zoom.

Jill Hauwiller, an executive coach and owner and principal at the leadership consultancy Leadership Refinery, told Axios that remote layoffs aren’t likely to go away soon. “With distributed teams and hybrid workplaces, virtual terminations are likely to become more common,” she told the website.

Which raises the question: If your organization is remote and HR is faced with the necessity of carrying out a headcount reduction over the internet, how do you go about it in a way that won’t inspire laid-off workers to write scathing rebukes on Glassdoor or to share their experiences with friends, family, or, worse, reporters (wink, wink)?

There are clearly ways not to approach it: Better.com CEO Vishal Garg embroiled his company in a PR fiasco when he took to an “anonymous professional network” to accuse some of the laid-off employees of “stealing” because, he alleged, they were “working an average of 2 hours a day while clocking in 8 hours+ a day in the payroll system,” Fortune first reported. (He took leave from the company late last year but returned in January.)

Hedda Bird, an organizational consultant, told HR Brew last December that you don’t need to make a bad thing worse. Any “messages need to be given either one to one, or in very small groups,” she explained. One key approach is emphasizing that decisions are often catalyzed by broader, extraneous circumstances. “This [decision] is not about you personally, it’s not a judgment on you, it is not a statement about you.”

Hey you. Yes, YOU. There in the back. Has your organization discussed how you might carry out layoffs over video? If so, has there been any discussion about how to take the sting out of unwanted news delivered over video chat? Join the discussion right here on HR Brew’s LinkedIn page, or reply to this email with your thoughts.—SB

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

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Over 6 million teenagers in the US, or 36%, held down a job for “at least part of last summer,” which is the highest summer employment rate for US teens since 2008, and “many economists are predicting another strong job market for teens this summer.” (Pew Research Center)

Quote: “They don’t want to talk about a hiring freeze, but what they are doing is adding an extra layer of scrutiny, like saying only the CEO can approve these jobs…There is this stealth slowdown.”—David Vied, a global sector leader at executive recruitment and consulting firm Korn Ferry, speaking about recession fears impacting hiring (Bloomberg)

Read: A Gen Z worker explains why she really misses office culture in this era of remote and hybrid work, which she argues “is not the perfect compromise we all thought it would be.” (Protocol)

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