ProjectsAn inclusive and engaging onboarding experience for international employees
Defining a new strategy and set of initiatives to make the onboarding process more effective at scale
How might a company deliver a memorable and effective onboarding experience to a high number of new hires, across three countries, joining both remotely and in-person, while catering to diverse needs and accelerating their integration?
Starting from an assessment of the existing bootcamp, we worked with Doctolib’s People Team to reimagine the onboarding journey as a scalable and inclusive experience. Through an initial immersive research (observation, shadowing and in-depth interviews in France and Germany), we identified key behavioural archetypes among New Joiners and mapped tensions in their early expectations. Those insights led to co-design workshops and strategy sessions aimed at shaping a more effective, personalised and flexible bootcamp structure.
A layered onboarding model combining a consistent baseline experience for everyone, with additional collective rituals to engage the “belongers”, plus optional customizable modules, to enable a more “strategic” use of the sessions. Over 30 ideas were generated, 20 prioritised in the first-year roadmap, and key features rapidly prototyped, including a cross-country agenda.
The first days within a new company leave a long-lasting mark on the relationship between an individual and the organisation which hired them. Poor on-boarding can lead to early attrition and underperforming employees, as well as limit the possibilities of business growth. If well designed, the employee onboarding can anchor not only essential knowledge, but more importantly, good practices, shared habits and perspectives.
Doctolib’s People Team continuously face the challenge of hiring and onboarding new employees. One of their key tools to meet this challenge is the ‘Doctolib Bootcamp’—a four-day induction programme originally designed for sales representatives and then extended to all company employees. While initially tailored to early-career professionals with limited experience and little knowledge of the healthcare sector, the company soon recognised the bootcamp’s potential as a scalable solution for all roles, from interns to department heads. It not only delivered essential information but also evolved into a strategic opportunity to build shared practices, introduce core tools, and express the company's culture from day one.
In 2022, due to rapid growth and increasing demand for hybrid onboarding, the People Team began exploring how to further improve the onboarding experience to make it even more scalable and effective across multiple countries. They got in touch with oblo to design a new and improved bootcamp experience as the first touchpoint of a long well-structured learning journey for every Doctolib employee.
The initial qualitative research phase involved one week of observation and shadowing, during which our team joined the bootcamp sessions in France and Germany. We experienced the early days in the company alongside New Joiners—from formal inductions to informal office tours—allowing us to gather first-hand impressions. This immersion was followed by a series of one-to-one interviews with both New Joiners and key bootcamp stakeholders (those responsible for delivering or impacted by the experience). Those conversations helped us gather a wide range of perspectives.
We synthesised the diverse attitudes and needs that emerged into behavioural archetypes, which became a foundation for sharing research insights and redesigning the onboarding strategy. For instance, 'The Doers' approach onboarding with a practical, results-focused mindset; they’re eager to start working and connect with their teams quickly. 'The Belongers' are enthusiastic about the social and cultural dimensions of the bootcamp, using it as a moment to feel part of the company. 'The Strategists' require flexibility from the outset, using this time to plan future collaborations and manage their already-busy agendas.
Shifting from the research to the strategy phase, we decided to take into account all of those behavioural tensions, rather than simplifying by compromising or prioritising specific attitudes over others. The design questions inspired by those behavioural tensions allowed us to create a fully inclusive experience, appealing to all the different New Joiners’ behaviours by mixing different aspects and paying attention to every necessity.
As a result, we proposed a layered strategy made up of a core experience—designed to equip all New Joiners with essential tools, processes and foundational knowledge—complemented by collective rituals and a suite of customisable extras. On top of the baseline experience, engaging moments of connection with other peers and Doctolib’s culture have been added to the Bootcamp, in order to give people a glimpse of what it means to work there and start establishing relationships. In addition, a few initiatives allow the more senior profiles to maximize the Bootcamp experience based on their availability, and condense their participation around the most meaninfgul moments or specific matters they are interested in. Every part of the experience is made accessible for people in person and online, and not-english/french speakers could easily participate in the sessions too thanks to dedicated moments in their native languages and simultaneous translation.
This new onboarding strategy generated over 30 potential experiments, which were refined into a shortlist of 20 initiatives that formed the basis of the People Team's roadmap for the following year. Successive design sprints enabled the rapid prototyping and testing of several of these ideas, including a modular and flexible cross-country agenda, and a new online page to publish the bootcamp program and other updates.
