Bazaarvoice onboards new hires with unique “scavenger hunt”

Marat Shafigullin, Enterprise Project Manager at Bazaarvoice

After monitoring Austin’s tech market from Russia, Marat Shafigullin joined Bazaarvoice after he found LinkedIn friends who enjoyed working here. He joined last month as an Enterprise Project Manager, and he recently completed our new onboarding program – the Bazaarvoice scavenger hunt.

The scavenger hunt is a series of tasks and questions designed to expose new hires to all areas of our company – our structure, history, events, departments, and, most importantly, our culture, and it gives us all a way to meet each other. We sat down with Marat to hear his thoughts on the experience, and his unique welcome.

What was the scavenger hunt like?

The scavenger hunt started for me on Monday. Luckily three new hires started the same day, so we formed a team to help each other out. It definitely made it more interesting, because we were able to feed off of each other’s ideas to get our tasks done more efficiently. When you first start out here, you’re all in the same boat. Working together was a bit of a bonding experience, which I liked.

What did you learn from the scavenger hunt?

I don’t think you can really understand the culture here until you’ve lived it. I learned a lot about Bazaarvoice as a company, and met a lot of people in different areas. There were tasks that aimed to teach new hires about the culture, like reading about the five stars and interviewing some winners of the Bazaarvoice Culture Awards.

But I think the most valuable part of the scavenger hunt was the high-level knowledge I now have of Bazaarvoice as a whole. The scavenger hunt helped me meet a lot of people at all levels of the company very quickly, and learn what they do. It was good preparation for my future here, because I won’t be afraid to reach out to other departments and people when I need an answer. That openness between departments and organizational levels is good.

It was a much more interesting and engaging way of getting on board than sitting through an orientation or reading a handbook.

Bazaarvoice is growing, and as such, we’re hiring other great folks like Marat. If you know a rock star, refer them here for up to a $5000 referral bonus.