New Hire Onboarding Scavenger Hunt
Welcome a new colleague with a hunt that gets them connecting with the team, exploring the office and picking up the unwritten rules from day one. Designed as a starting point: add your own challenges about your company, founders or neighborhood to make it personal. Look for the [Customize!] prompts as inspiration.
Challenges (20)
First-day desk selfie
Take a selfie at your new desk on day one. Looking slightly unsure is allowed and encouraged. This will be the "before" photo you laugh at in a year.
Coffee initiation
Find the coffee machine, kettle or whatever caffeine ritual lives here. Take a photo of yourself making your first drink at the company. Bonus if a colleague has to show you which button does what.
Mystery role
Find a colleague whose job title you do not yet understand. Ask them to explain what they actually do in one sentence, then take a photo together.
The veteran
Hunt down the longest-tenured colleague you can find today. Take a photo together and write down one piece of advice they offered.
Workspace reveal
Photograph your full desk setup at the end of the day: monitor, chair, whatever you have decorated it with. Empty water bottles count as decoration.
Lunch crew
Have lunch with at least two colleagues you had not met before this morning. Take a group photo of the spread, the people and your sad sandwich all in one shot.
Tool of the trade
Ask a colleague to show their favorite work tool. Could be a piece of software on screen, a notebook, a specific mug, a chair they fought for. Take a photo of them with it.
The lounge
Find the most "lived-in" spot in the office: couch corner, kitchen, table tennis room, whatever passes for a lounge here. Take a photo of yourself in full relax mode.
Plant patrol
Every office has at least one plant (or one very lonely cactus). Find the most photogenic one and take a portrait of it as if it is the cover of a magazine.
Cross-functional handshake
Find a colleague from a department completely different from yours (engineering meets finance, sales meets ops, design meets HR). Take a photo together that captures the contrast.
Sticky wisdom
Find a whiteboard, sticky note wall or any surface covered in handwritten team thinking. Take a photo. Bonus if you can decipher one of the notes and explain what it means.
First teacher
Take a photo with the first person who taught you something today, big or small. Write down what they taught you so you remember it next week.
Snack discovery
Find the unofficial "best snack" in the office: a candy drawer, fruit bowl, sneaky cookie stash, fancy chocolate someone brought back from a trip. Take a photo of it (and yourself with it).
The view
Take a photo of the view from your workspace. Window, hallway, monitor wall, brick wall, whatever you will be staring at for the next stretch of your career.
Meeting room hop
Photograph yourself in three different meeting rooms in one day. Different rooms, different poses. Try the smallest room and the largest room if you can find them.
Personalized desk
Hunt down the most personalized desk you can find: decorations, framed photos, a wall of stickers, a small army of action figures. Take a photo, then ask the owner why they picked one specific item.
Buddy portrait
Take a creative photo with your onboarding buddy (or whoever has been most helpful today). Make it look like a portrait, not a meeting selfie. Outdoor, lobby, against a colorful wall, your call.
[Customize!] Company origin
Take a creative photo that represents your company's founding story: the moment, the place, the first product, the founders. (Organizers: replace this with a trivia question or photo prompt about your founding year, the founders' first office, your first customer, or your earliest product.)
[Customize!] What we stand for
Take a photo expressing one of your company's core values in action: a real moment, a creative interpretation, a staged scene. (Organizers: replace this with a prompt tied to a specific value, a story behind your mission, or an artifact that captures the culture.)
[Customize!] Around the office
Find a notable spot near the office (a statue, a building, a park, a famous street) and take a photo there. (Organizers: replace this with a GPS challenge to a specific local landmark, a trivia question about your neighborhood, or a photo prompt at your favorite local lunch spot.)
Frequently asked questions
Hand it over at the end of day one, after the new hire has met their manager and seen their desk. By day two they have low-pressure reasons to walk around, introduce themselves and ask questions, which is exactly when the office still feels intimidating. Most hires finish naturally within the first two weeks as their schedule fills.
The challenges are written so the new hire stays in control: nobody is forced into a group selfie or a viral lipdub. The introductions read more like "find one person who knows X" than "throw yourself at the team". A few hires skip the loudest prompts and use the [Customize!] slots to add quieter ones, which is fine and even encouraged.
Very. Three of the twenty challenges are explicitly marked [Customize!] and are placeholders for company-specific moments (founder video, values, org chart). Beyond those, every challenge is editable text and image, so you can rewrite any of them to mention your office, your tools or your culture. After the new hire activates the template, it lives in their adventure and stays separate from the public template.
No, it runs alongside it. A formal program covers compliance, role expectations, tooling and 30/60/90 plans. The hunt covers the cultural and social side that formal programs almost always miss. New hires who get both report feeling settled faster than ones who get either alone.
Every hunt has a stats dashboard in the admin where you can see per-challenge completion, which colleagues the new hire connected with and the photos they submitted. The qualitative signal still matters most though: a first-month check-in asking "did you feel like part of the team within two weeks?" and how many colleagues they can name from their hunt photos. The dashboard data plus that one question covers it.