One of the many ways Arcurve really supports their people is with an exemplary onboarding experience, and they really go above and beyond when it comes to their student interns.
Arcurve’s onboarding is designed to introduce the workings of the company – from internal operations to product development to fostering personal connections with co-workers – all within the framework of fun activities.
My personal onboarding experience was a robust, five-day event that involved many engaging challenges and immersive activities that included all 24 interns from across Canada. This in-depth initiation helped to streamline my engagement, learning curve, productivity, and overall enjoyment of my internship. And this summer, I was offered a unique and exciting opportunity to curate the onboarding process for our high school students.
Project Overview:
For the incoming summer students, I was tasked with condensing the traditional week-long intern onboarding program into a concise, yet impactful, two-days to help them hit the ground running. My goal was to have them gain an understanding of the work we do, what it takes to run our business, and have them get to know one another by working together, facilitating those team connections, and welcoming them into our community.
Planning and Execution: Turning Challenges into Creative Solutions
1. Cover the core components: To present these distilled concepts (internal operations, finance, talent acquisition, marketing, and service delivery) in an easily understandable format for the high school students, I enlisted the help of my fellow interns from various departments to explain the different roles within Arcurve. This exercise both showcased the diversity of roles within Arcurve and acquainted the students with their peers. By having the existing interns from different roles share their job insights, they were provided with an opportunity to take on a mentorship role – a mutually beneficial exercise.
2. Learning with a twist: To help kickstart the high school students’ internship, I integrated a blend of my favorite activities from my onboarding process, such as the Agile Lego Game and Mock Interviews, while also crafting a new customized Scavenger Hunt.
The Agile Lego Game - designed to emulate Arcurve’s software development process. It not only made the learning fun (cause hey! It’s LEGO) and interactive, but also instills an idea of the problem-solving skills and collaboration dynamics that our exemplary interns require in their roles.
Scavenger Hunt – I created the clues intending to help the interns familiarize themselves with the Arcurve space, some of the other employees, and surrounding amenities. I wanted this to work as a team-building exercise and curated it with my high school self in mind. I would’ve really enjoyed something like this– having an excuse to explore and become familiar with the space without feeling intrusive, and to have an opportunity to get to know my peers.
Mock Interview – I wanted to recycle the mock interview activity that was included in my onboarding as an icebreaker for the students. Arcurve’s interview process is a core concept covered in the presentation- what goes into it and the reasoning behind why it is so extensive. This activity tasks the students to find out why they were all chosen to be hired, while facilitating yet another opportunity for them to get to know each other a little better.
3. Project Retrospective: Okay, This Was Good, How Can I Do It Better…
After witnessing this series on onboarding events unfold and reflecting upon them, I believe that my edits and the activities I added were well-suited in theory but need a little more refinement in order to yield the best results for future onboardings. The scavenger hunt seemed to be well enjoyed, but the clues should be more indicative of company resources in addition to the physical corporate place. Another improvement is including rehearsal time for the interns’ presentations.
Final Thoughts:
Having the opportunity to run a project of this magnitude is extremely valuable for me as a university student. Entrusting an intern with this important responsibility speaks volumes about Arcurve and their commitment to providing excellent internship experiences and look forward to tackling the new challenges to come.
