Stand Out in the Workplace by Doing THIS!
About this video
Jeff argues that mentoring new hires at scale is an easy way to stand out at work. He says that in his second full-time job he was promoted relatively quickly for three reasons: transferable skills from management consulting, a supportive manager, and helping cut onboarding time for new hires by around 20 percent. Early on he recorded videos teaching new sales team joiners the basics of digital marketing, adding his own observations and mistakes to avoid, mainly to avoid answering the same one-on-one questions repeatedly. He gives three reasons it raised his visibility. First, the curse of knowledge, a concept he attributes to C.S. Lewis: people learn best from someone just one step ahead of them, which is why buddy systems pair newcomers with teammates who joined 6 to 12 months earlier. Second, it helps senior leadership, since managers know they are not best placed to teach operational details. Third, word of mouth: citing Jonah Berger’s book Contagious, practical, tangible advice gets talked about, and new hires have one-on-ones with many people in their first months. The key is scale, helping 100 people rather than one or two. He originally recorded his screen and voice, on Mac with QuickTime Player and on PC with free tools like OBS, Xbox Game Bar, and Zoom, teaching batches of 20 to 30 at once, but the videos had to be redone after any mistake, were less effective than written instructions for click-by-click tasks, and went outdated about every six months. In a sponsored segment he demonstrates Scribe instead: it captures clicks into an editable written guide, with cropping and redaction, that can be shared by link. He advises collecting Scribes in a central Google Doc for each new-hire batch, tracking view counts as concrete metrics for performance reviews, updating guides when processes change, and checking company security and privacy policies because Scribe records the entire screen once started.
Key takeaways
- Jeff credits mentoring that cut new-hire onboarding time by around 20 percent as one of three reasons for a quick promotion in his second full-time job.
- New hires learn best from someone one step ahead of them, not the top expert, which is why buddy systems pair them with teammates who joined 6 to 12 months earlier.
- Teaching at scale beats one-off help: Jeff’s videos reached batches of 20 to 30 new hires at once instead of answering the same questions in repeated one-on-ones.
- Written, editable guides beat screen recordings for click-by-click instructions because recordings must be redone after mistakes and go stale when products change, roughly every six months in his case.
- Keep all guides in one central Google Doc for new hires, track their views as evidence for performance reviews, and check security and privacy policies before recording your whole screen.
Episode details: published November 30, 2021 · 7:13 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Jeff Su’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.
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