⚠️ Some information in this page might be outdated.

As we are a volunteer organisation, we need all the help we can get. However, in order to keep the quality of the learning material high as well as provide a smooth on-boarding experience that is thorough and yet respects everyone’s time, we should split the process into two phases

1. Recruiting
2. Onboarding

Recruiting

So far, our team has been growing more or less in an organic way, and mostly through referrals. The most common scenario was: I need help with something (a BLU in a specialisation, for instance), I know someone who can help, let’s recruit them.

However, for the first time, we have been receiving messages from people who want to help us teaching. But we don’t personally know them, and have never worked with them before. This is great news, more people helping will make our lives easier. However, we need a recruitment process that considers this scenario, so that the quality of our learning materials respects our standards.

So, here is our recruitment process. Throughout this, let’s call the person who wants to join us, the candidate.

Step 1: Interview 1 - Communication of Org Structure and Instructor Expectations

The first step in the recruitment process is to tell the candidate how the academy works and what they’re expected to do as an instructor. This task may be done by: a) The instructor who knows the candidate and is recruiting them to join the academy. In this case the interview will most likely be an informal conversation, and that’s totally fine! b) An instructor who was assigned to interview the candidate, because the candidate is not personally known by anyone in the academy. In this case, the interview should be more like a proper interview.

This interview can happen either in person or in a call, and should cover the following:

• An assessment of the candidate’s skills - just talk nerdy and make sure that they know what they are talking about! You don’t need to go too deep on specific things here, just make sure they are comfortable with the more fundamental things about data science.
• How the starters academy works: bootcamp (SLUs), specialisations (BLUs), hackathons.
• Our curriculum
• The time commitment that being an instructor at the academy requires
• This one is more for the unknown candidates. After explaining in a really detailed way what we’re all about, ask about how do they want to participate in the starters academy and in our community: do they just want to teach a specific thing or are they available to help with other tasks? Do they want to belong to the community in the long-term or is this more a temporary thing? In the very unlikely scenario of us having too many people volunteering to teach, we should prefer those who are willing to commit in a longer-term way and help with more tasks than just teaching.

In order to help you with this, you should share with them the following information (this information needs an update! TBD):

1. The website
2. The starters academy course wiki page
3. The code of conduct
4. The in-depth curriculum for the learning units they will cover.
5. The bootcamp repo
6. The example BLU01
7. The learning unit guide
8. The time commitments and timetables for delivering a specialisation.
   • In case you’re recruiting them to help with a specialisation, they’ll probably build a single BLU and offer some student support. This will correspond to one of the Building BLU<number> rows in the spreadsheet, picking one of the slots to offer student support, and showing up to the hackathon.
   • Preparation starts 4 weeks before the beginning of the specialization’s month.
9. The instructor calendar
10. The curriculum and material reference page 🚧 (#TODO)

It is very important to communicate in this interview what is the nature of the volunteering work that we need at the academy: stick to what you’ve committed to! We’re going to trust in what the candidate tells us about the level of commitment that they want to have in the academy. The important part is that they understand that everything one says they’re doing and then end up not doing, is going to be done by another person in a tighter time frame. Thus, they should never be dishonest or overpromise in the interviewing, because that will be bad for everybody.

If the outcome of this Step is positive (the candidate is aligned with the academy’s values, agrees with the curriculum, is willing to commit enough time to be an instructor, etc.), the instructor who did the interview is now the candidate’s sponsor.

Step 2: The candidate may join the team

If the sponsor is comfortable enough about it, the candidate may now join the team. This means that they will be added to the “Leaders of LDSA” slack and be introduced to everyone in the #announcements channel. (But let’s keep calling them candidate, for simplicity).

This should only happen now if the sponsor knew the candidate from before and if there is a very high probability of the candidate being assigned to a teaching task. Otherwise, the candidate may only join the team later.

Step 3: The candidate is assigned some teaching work

The candidate can now be assigned some teaching work, like teaching an SLU at the bootcamp, building a BLU for a specialisation or preparing an hackathon.

Depending on where we are at the academy, it can take some time to move to this Step!

Regarding what kind of tasks can be assigned to the candidate. If the sponsor of the candidate is someone who has worked with them before, we should be more willing to give them more responsibility. For example, letting them lead on a specialisation. If the sponsor has never worked with them before in a professional environment, we should hedge our bets with the amount of work that we give them first. For example, don’t give them more than preparing a BLU and doing some office hours.

Step 4: The final call

This conversation should be with anyone who has been an instructor in the past editions of the academy (if the candidate is being assigned to an SLU) or a Specialisation Lead (if the candidate is being assigned to a specialisation), and we’ll call this person, the interviewer. Tthe interviewer must not be the same person as the sponsor!

The conversation can be in person or in a call. If the first interview didn’t happen in person, this one should, if possible.

The sponsor should communicate to the interviewer how much do they know and trust the candidate, yielding two scenarios. a) The sponsor knows the candidate very well, has worked with them before and is very confident that the candidate should join the academy. In this case, this interview can be a short protocol thing, with the predictable outcome that the candidate is now formally part of the team b) The sponsor doesn’t know the candidate so well, has never worked with them before or might not be 100% confident about the candidate joining the academy. In this case, this interview should be a more serious one, covering the same topics as the first one plus going deeper on the technical side.

If the interviewer is happy, the candidate can now formally join the team. The assignment from Step 3 gets confirmed and they formally become an instructor!

Onboarding

Tools

1. Sam should add them to Slack
   • The student slack
   • The instructor slack
     • Make a quick introduction (if this was not done yet)
   • Invite them to the appropriate channels
2. Add them to the curriculum developers github group

Send them to the onboarding wiki page

Search the sidebar for it, it’s there!