Carta is an equity management and investment platform with a mission to unlock the power of equity for more people in more places. Carta currently has over 2.4 million equity owners, 35,000 businesses, and $2.5 trillion in assets on the platform. They provide a variety of services to help users manage equity, build their businesses, and invest in future success.

Carta has been steadily growing over the past few years (since 2021, the company has brought on more than 1,000 new team members). And to support that growth, the Carta team needed a way to automate their pre-onboarding and onboarding messaging for Carta’s New Hire Onboarding Experience, Basecamp ⛺.

Theodore J. Paat, Senior Learning & Development Program Manager at Carta, and Nazhat Vitale, Senior Manager, Learning & Development at Carta, share how Pyn has improved the company’s communication with new hires and new managers. 

Challenge: Supporting new hires through the initial employee experience

Carta’s team recognized that their initial communications with new hires were crucial, as those first interactions laid the foundation for the employees’ experience with the company.

“The initial experience a new hire has as an employee sets a real expectation around what’s ahead,” says Theo. “And that has a lasting impression way beyond their first week.”

Nazhat and her team were also focused on improving the experience for new managers—and, more specifically, how to get them acclimated with the way Carta, as an organization, approached management.

“You have to have the technical skills to lead and to manage people,” says Nazhat. “But at the same time, you have to mix in the behavioral aspect of how we at Carta approach management.”

With Carta’s level of growth, sending messages with important, but standard information and resources manually would be extremely time-consuming. Nazhat explains, “Pyn enabled us to provide managers with the foundational information they needed at exactly the right time. Without Pyn, we would need to message each new manager one at a time, and then keep track of that communication. Pyn automates that manual work, so that we can focus on being a strategic and consultative resource for our managers.”

In 2021, they recognized they needed a way to streamline their pre-onboarding and onboarding communications, delivering the right information at the right time—while also creating key engagement touchpoints throughout each employee’s new hire experience.

And that’s when they started using Pyn.

Solution: Automated communications throughout pre-onboarding and onboarding

The Carta team currently uses Pyn as a way to automate their pre-onboarding and onboarding Basecamp ⛺communications and create key engagement touchpoints throughout each employee’s new hire experience. In addition to the Basecamp ⛺communications that go out during pre-onboarding and onboarding, there are a few additional engagement touchpoints, including at the conclusion of Basecamp ⛺programming, the start of their second week at Carta, and at the 30/60/90 day markers thereafter.

“We use Pyn for engaging our new hires,” says Theo. “It helps us get  them excited about joining and being part of Carta.”

This includes setting employees up for success from day one by sharing personalized information that helps ease anxiety that a new hire may be feeling before their first day as well as continued communication as they navigate their first weeks and months with the company.

“Every milestone that a new hire goes through provides a different opportunity for a touchpoint and engagement,” says Theo.

The Carta team also uses Pyn to engage with new people managers, sending automated Slack messages introducing them to Carta’s People Management Group, where they can access training and L&D opportunities around Carta’s unique approach to people management, ask questions, and find support as they settle into their position with the company.

Results: Higher engagement for new hires—and higher productivity for the L&D team

Automating some of the communication with Pyn has completely changed the way Theo and the Carta team work.

In the last year alone, Carta sent more than 3,000 pre-onboarding and onboarding messages to new hires. Estimating that sending a message manually takes about five minutes, Pyn was able to give Theo a whopping 271 hours of his time back (almost two full months of work!)—time he was able to redirect towards strategic initiatives including the development of Ascend (an aspiring managers program) and revamping Managing@Carta, the manager onboarding program.

“I got to do more things strategically instead of operationally because our communication process was more efficient,” says Theo. 

Theo also used this time to  improve the quality of onboarding content and partner with other departments and team members to ensure the onboarding process was as helpful, thorough, and comprehensive as possible. 

Ultimately, this helped Carta reach more people with more effective messaging. “I don't think we would have been able to reach as many people as we did had we done it manually,” says Theo. 

The Carta team have been so impressed with their results using Pyn for Basecamp ⛺, they’ve started automating additional communications, including benefits enrollment and an internal feedback campaign.  “Throughout an employee’s tenure, we’re  connecting at key moments in ways that show each employee, ’We value you. We recognize your individual needs–and here’s information specific to how Carta can support you in this moment,’” explains Theo.

Future Plans

It takes a lot of different people across a lot of different departments to successfully onboard new hires. Moving forward, Theo plans to partner with Carta’s other functional enablement teams to integrate their new hire messages into the Pyn platform so that new hires have a more seamless onboarding experience.

“We’re creating an experience where I pass the baton to our functional enablement teams,” says Theo. That way, “it feels like a continuation of their onboarding journey as new hires have a consistent, frictionless experience beyond their first week,” says Theo.

By automating messaging throughout different areas of onboarding and the new hire experience, Pyn can also help increase communications efficiency across the organization, giving teams the opportunity to spend more time directly training new hires.