About the New Hire Introduction

Introducing a new hire to the organization, such as through a welcome email or a post on Slack or Teams, is often seen as a formality - a box to check on the new person’s first day on the job. In practice, this easily overlooked moment carries immense potential for the success of a new hire’s social onboarding. Done right, it can act as a powerful catalyst which sparks connections, conversations and friendships with coworkers across the organization. Done wrong, it can leave a new hire feeling overlooked and alienated from their team. This is especially true in hybrid or remote workplaces, where a team does not have the same degree of in-person interaction to support team bonding. 

Four Types of New Hire Introduction

While there are many ways to introduce a new hire to their teammates, not all are created equal. The diagram below organizes these approaches along two axes: length of introduction, or how much information the new hire shares with their team, and whose “voice” the information appears in - i.e. is the new hire introducing themselves in their own style and voice, or is an existing employee, such as a manager or HR representative, introducing the new hire on their behalf.

As illustrated above, organizing New Hire Intros in this way reveals four distinct types of introductions:

1. The Manager Blurb
2. The Company Survey
3. The Employee Blurb
4. The Employee Blog

While each format has its strengths and weaknesses, the Employee Blog significantly outperforms all other formats as a means of accelerating social connection at an organization.

The following section describes each format, including how to implement it, and its strengths and weaknesses. 

Manager blurb (short, company voice) 

In this format, the manager or an HR representative shares a short blurb about the new hire on whatever tool the company uses for internal communication, such as Slack, Teams, email, or an internal intranet. This message is often as short as the person’s name, role and team, coupled with a friendly welcome message. Sometimes, the manager or HR representative will separately solicit a few facts from the employee about their career history and personal interests, and draft a blurb on their behalf.

The benefit of this approach is that it is relatively easy and involves minimal work for the new hire or the manager, at least at first. The downside is that by sharing little to no information about the new hire with the rest of the team, it makes it harder for existing team members to discover shared interests and spark conversations with their new co-worker. Any time or effort saved up front is typically outweighed by the additional effort required by the new hire and everyone on their team to connect without any basic information to kindle these early conversations. 

Employee blurb (short, employee voice)

In this format, the manager asks the employee to introduce themselves in a few sentences to the team. This is often done asynchronously over Slack, Teams, or Email, and occasionally live at a company standup or town hall. 

The main benefit of this format is that the new hire gets to introduce themselves in their own voice, choosing what to share and imbuing the message with their own personal style. Outgoing and lighthearted types can load up their blurbs with a joke or emojis. Quieter types can be more reserved. And since the introduction is only a few sentences, it is hard to go wrong.

The downside of course is that with only a few sentences, it can be hard to share the type of information that actually helps share your personality and kick start conversations and connections. In fact, when you condense every introduction to a few lines, they all start to sound the same: Hi everyone, I’m X, I am joining the Y team, before this role I was Z, and outside of work I enjoy A, B and C. Lurking beneath this short summary is a deep iceberg of content that would help the new hire display their personality and connect with their peers. Unfortunately, when compressed to such a short blurb, most of that valuable information is lost.  

Company survey (long, company voice)

In this format, the company, usually led by HR, sends out a survey with a consistent set of open-ended “get to know you” questions for the employee to fill out. These surveys can be created using a simple document template (such as Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or Notion), or by using a survey tool like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey. Some HR software tools, such as Bamboo HR, even offer a feature which automatically sends a “Get To Know You” survey to new employees and then, once complete, automatically shares the responses by email with the entire organization. 

The benefit of this approach is that it enables the employee to share a little bit more about themselves with their team. And while the organization decides on the questions and the content to be shared, (which is why we categorize this approach as being in the “company voice”), the employee is the one drafting their responses, enabling them to include some of their own personal style as well.  

The main downside of this approach is that a uniform set of questions is rarely effective to draw out the best and most authentic side of a diverse group of people. Common questions about favourite sports or music groups, for example, may be great for some people, but alienating for others - such as those whose interests or passions fall outside the list of questions, or who would prefer not to share those aspects of themselves. In this situation, the new hire may feel forced to present an inauthentic view of themselves, or choose to check out of the exercise altogether.  

A great example of this dynamic arose when the Welcomepage team was interviewing recent new hires about their onboarding experience. One senior manager explained: “I was asked in an onboarding survey about my favourite bands. Great, I love music - but I am 15 years older than the average person at the company. I already feel a bit weird about that, I don’t want to date myself with music that no one else can relate to. So what do I say? Do I fake it and make up some modern bands I kind-of like? That doesn’t feel good either.” 

To ease this pressure, some companies default to more lightweight, ice breaker questions, like the person’s favourite food or place to travel. These questions do reduce the pressure to “fit into a box”, but in doing so, they also erode the value of the exercise, as they shrink the room for the person to share anything substantive about their personality. Also, because the company uses the same set of questions for every hire, the responses often begin to come out uniform and boring, causing the rest of the team to lose interest in the exercise.

Employee blog (long, employee voice)

The employee blog is exactly what it sounds like: a slightly longer form, open-ended introduction, written by the employee, to introduce themselves and share their personal and professional background with their team, in whatever level of detail they like. And while this format is called a “blog”, this doesn’t imply that the information is public or posted to the internet. This information should only be shared internally.  

The main benefit of this exercise is that, done right, it can give the new hire the space and flexibility to introduce themselves in whatever way they feel comfortable, and using the content that will be most helpful in helping them share their personality and form connections with their team. Are you very family oriented, and like when your coworkers know the people back home? Talk about it and share a photo. Do you have a side hustle or passion project that you’re really proud of, and shows a side of yourself that you want your colleagues to know? Add a link. Or are you a more private person, and want to share very little about these things with your peers? Keep it short and simple.

‍

Another benefit is that, if the blog is created using a tool that allows for interactivity, such as the ability to add comments or react with emojis, the blog itself can help drive a sense of belonging. There are few things more holstering than sharing a blog post about yourself, and then having the experience reciprocated with a flood of positive engagement from your peers on the content you shared.  

The main challenge is that being handed a blank page on your first day and being told to “introduce yourself” can be an unpleasant experience. Even for practiced writers, writing about yourself to a group of strangers is challenging: what should you include or exclude? How long should it be? What is “normal” at the new organization? While the goal isn’t to conform, it can be uncomfortable to be thrust into such a personal exercise before anyone really knows you, and with minimal understanding of the company culture. 

Fortunately, there are tools and techniques (including, ahem, Welcomepage!) to get all of the good things out of the Employee Blog, while mitigating all of the discomfort around starting with a blank page. See our deep dive on how to write a good employee blog for a helpful playbook for how to do so. 

‍