On Doing Things Afraid: Recruiting and Onboarding 7500 ambassadors
“Nimi, I called you to talk about recruitment. So, we’d be having a recruitment and onboarding team to ease the stress on the management team, and you’d be the one leading that team.”
I know this looks like a word-for-word quote, but it actually isn’t. I don’t remember Timi’s exact words, but I know it was something along these lines that made me understand what exactly I was going to be doing in the Cowrywise community for the next few months. Honestly, during that call, I just kept saying yes and okay because it sounded normal. Exciting, but seemingly normal.
Then the call ended, and I spoke to my friend, another ambassador, and then the reality hit me. The last time Cowrywise recruited new ambassadors was November 2021, and it was a whole year later by the time for the next one. I knew how many people approached me to ask how they could be Cowrywise ambassadors, and I knew our goal was to reach 10,000 ambassadors by H1 of 2023. The way the reality hit wasn’t good, to be honest. I was spiralling because none of it seemed possible, but it was too late to back out. Thinking about it now, I don’t think I would have backed out if I could. As one of my favourite team leads says, “Nimi loves challenges”. Backing out is usually not an option.
Then recruitment came. First off, I want to give big ups to both the recruitment and management teams during the time I was the Recruitment and Onboarding Team lead. Having teams that were supportive made my experience better than I expected. Recruitment itself didn’t happen without hassles, to be honest. The presidential elections in 2023 set us back in our timeline by a few weeks, and so did some other hitches. Apart from that, the campaign went smoothly, with Campus Leads pushing recruitment to their various campuses as much as possible.
One of the highlights of the recruitment calendar content for me was the five-day challenge, where we just answered questions I picked to have people share their experiences on Twitter. The answers from different ambassadors made me realise how this community I’m a part of impacts many lives on different campuses.
Another thing I thoroughly enjoyed was being a part of the team of writers that added to the existing copy on the ambassadors’ landing page. This team ended up rebirthing the content team in the community. Opening this page to see how great our ideas, combined with supervision and feedback from Cowrywise staff, turned out always makes me glad.
PS: It’s important to note that I was the Assistant Campus Lead of my school while doing this — superstar from day 1.
When we finally closed the form for recruitment, we had almost 8,000 applications. Let me explain clearly. EIGHT THOUSAND students applied to be part of the Cowrywise campus ambassadors program. It was mind-blowing for me. At this point, I could finally breathe since recruitment was over.
SIKE! That was a lie.
I thought recruitment was the most challenging part, but Onboarding was actually the hardest. We accepted around 7500 people into the program, reaching our goal of 10,000 ambassadors even before H1. So, my team of around 15 people and I had to onboard about 7500 people, with help from Campus leads and the management team members. The first hurdle was creating an onboarding calendar. Timi and Ralph hopped on the most calls with me, spending hours figuring out how to maximise time and get as many people as possible to attend the session while navigating Google’s new policies of meeting times and attendees. It was filled with spending a huge chunk of my screen time on Coda, finding out who was available for what and making sure we avoided using Zoom (Yes, I don’t like Zoom).
We had an onboarding plan and calendar laid out, but after seeing how the first day went, we had to return to the drawing board and realign how we wanted to achieve the goal of onboarding everybody as fast and effectively as possible . At the end of it all, we had about 15 onboarding sessions, three daily sessions for five days. Then, there was one final one for people who missed their onboarding. There were different experiences in each of these 15 sessions. I was in every single one, and no two were the same.
We had different kinds of ambassadors and new recruits on the call, giving different vibes. There were days some campus leads came to speak and anchor sessions, and there were days I had to do it myself. Repeating the same thing over ten times was more complicated than I thought. And the questions, oh God, the questions were a lot. Seeing how curious and eager people were was fun, but there were a lot!
At the end of the week, I felt relieved. Let’s pretend there wasn’t chaos when new ambassadors finally joined Slack. That’s the beginning of a new story entirely, a story for another day.
My experience as R & O Team lead taught me a lot of things, including patience, working with different kinds of people, managing decisions that are not completely yours to make and other stuff I keep applying in my daily life. I’ve also made the most amazing friends because of this entire process. There’s more in store for me, and a lot has happened between March and December.
For instance, this leadership experience set the path for my experience as the management team lead for the ambassadors’ community. As the Management Team Lead right now, I oversee a community of thousands of ambassadors alongside Timi, who is now the community lead and Ralph, who is in charge of the Graduate ambassadors community.
My experience as a Cowrywise ambassador has been so far from what I imagined, and even what it was a year ago. It has been such an amazing ride that I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Here’s to more unique experiences!
