Protocol for recruit new Mozillians

I’m working as a recruiter for the Italian community and I get a lot of contacts, mainly online but also in live, 1:1 to people that are interested to join the community.
The problem is that: leave only links about sites (ex: oneandone, talks, whatcanidoformozilla) is not enough, the people lost interest.
I saw that if there is an 1:1 contact and a mentor that guide him, the people join more easily for every area (ex: Localization, Development, Support ecc).
My idea is create a protocol/boilerplate (I love IT terms), to adapt for every community for their approach/workflow, as a start point for people involved in the first step of recruitment.
I call this part scouting/or the padawan way: listen the person for him interest, what he want to do, what he want to do when will have the knowledge etc…
I think that protocol need to be a simple document with questions, maybe a flowchart/uml and few tips.

Actually my protocol is ask:

  • What is your job/study course?
  • What is your passion?
  • Do you know English?
  • Do you know develop?
  • what would you start?
  • What you like to do when you will have knowledge/time?

After that found the area and another mentor/myself and a path to help him to join.
Create the path can be difficult for every person and create a starting protocol/boilerplate can be useful.

Before to create a ticket on https://github.com/mozilla/participation-org/ I want your feedback about that idea or experience. :smiley:

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Good set of questions. But I think figuring out which questions to ask would be easier than finding a (or the right) mentor for each new contributor. In relation to the community playbook I’ve heard the idea of crowd-mentoring which will help in avoiding bottle necks. It’ll also help to form mentor groups for communities.

But yes! Someone should actually talk to each new person who joins and help her feel welcome and find a nest inside Mozilla. In fact, that’s something I’ve noticed in this post about how Chayn runs.

Also, while talking about what questions to ask, whatcanidoformozilla does work like a good flowchart. Asking the same questions as in that one, in a more natural/human way would work.

This is awesome. A few thoughts! Take or leave.

Because there are only so many hours in the day, and mentorship & 1:1 time is so precious… I think it might be worth considering what contributors you want to recruit, and then designing outreach to filter for those people . And if there are no specific recruitment goals, then I still recommend designing something that provides one or two steps that act as filters for commitment so mentors time is used to it’s fullest potential.

There could be some good experimentation around this boiler template as well. To answer questions

  1. How do we engage skilled contributors? Remember even someone with expert level skills, might need mentoring in ‘open source’. We lose these people too because they can’t figure out how to get involved.
  2. How do we understand what people most need from onboarding, and from mentorship? What really helps connects people to each other, and to the project.
  3. What are the top 5 most rewarding onboarding experiences for a new Mozillian?
  4. How do we match mentors for participation? What, if any training should we think about providing to those mentors (as we do with reps).

A few other questions that you might want to ask in your template, to help filter

  1. Based on 2-3 month period on average how much time per week would you have to commit ? (this helps you evaluate your own investment , if someone only has an hour per week then you know it will be tricky to build this relationships).

  2. When would you like to start? (sometimes people are just being curious, but have no immediate availability, this helps prioritize)

  3. What are your current strengths ? Scenario, this person says hey want to learn Django, but then you find they have a degree in something that helps them contribute in another way while learning Django. Connecting the ‘whole’ person and not just the thing they want to do.

  4. How does contributing connect with your personal goals for your career? This can help you keep this in mind, for mentorship. If they start thinking about the potential of joining the community as a something that can help personal goals, that pathway might be easier to design for them.

So those are my thoughts, more focused on engaging contributors who are most likely to benefit from mentoring, and as well make the most use of mentor time. I would love to see how this goes - and stay in the loop! Happy to chat more as well as you work on this. Great initiative!

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it’s great you are thinking about this @Mte90 as @asdofindia commented we are currently working on a Community playbook that is going to include tips and tricks about on boarding.

Let me know if you are interested in chiming in to work on this

https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/community-playbook/4890

For the Philippine Community, since our country is an archipelago, we have something like this: http://join.mozillaph.org … sign-ups are then contacted by respective teams ticked as an interest by the volunteer. However, we do not have a established on-boarding system yet.

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I started to write my rules that I use for recruiting new volunteers:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kg7CxZIyebsXEjXWxGKxov84NWgEm-eQ8FFFWC2AsJk/edit
It is a working in progress that I am improving (aka writing after leave in my mind) with the reading of Tao of Coaching and with http://mzl.la/whyopensource slides.

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I think that my document it’s ready, contain also the ideal activities for a new volunteer :slight_smile:

Looks cool.

For the activities section, I would consider the activities instead from the Activate Campaign and probably some from the Mozilla Leadership Network at https://learning.mozilla.org/

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The document meaning is based on a chat with a future probably volunteer so need something very easy and leave a link without a mentor in my experience means to lost that person.
So I prefer that activities because I cannot control what are the activities on that projects.
When I talk with a new volunteer i became his reference so I need to know everything as activities so I prefer to leave links like that only when he started to join the community and look for something more advanced but not at first chat.

I improved again the docs adding the Motivate, Communication Channels, How to manage a meeting and improving the oldest section.
I think that is ready and will be helpful for the regional coaches with the other official playbook available from Mozilla.

After months I updated again the doc with a better organizations, 2 new pages and new sections like about meetings and mentoring: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kg7CxZIyebsXEjXWxGKxov84NWgEm-eQ8FFFWC2AsJk/edit#

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New version 1.2: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kg7CxZIyebsXEjXWxGKxov84NWgEm-eQ8FFFWC2AsJk/edit

Added link to talk in public section
New type of audience: sysadmin/high tech people
New section about How Communicate, How to talk with people, How to do reports
Improved section How to approach a problem or How to organize a team
English fixes everywhere
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Excellent iniciative @Mte90! :clap:

There should be something as simple as watching an interactive video in which any volunteer wants to participate in the community and how to represent “WHAT CAN I DO” is easier to attract for everyone.

Yes, totally agree with that.
I think that more than a mentor, it may be possible to select a responsible person in each community that is dedicated to guiding these new volunteers, and at the same time, this responsible person can present the results regarding the process of knowing the skills and abilities of these mozillians.

I really love this idea and I think it will be very productive :wink:

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