The Best Way To Onboard Your New Hires

Here’s an important question to ask if you’re involved in talent acquisition: do you have a system in place to connect recruiting to onboarding?

Companies spend a significant amount of resources finding, screening, and hiring new employees, and then drop the ball when it comes to one of the most defining early experiences for new employees, onboarding. According to this study by the workforce insights arm of Equifax, over 50% of employees who made the decision to quit did so in the first year of employment, and 41% made that decision within the first 6 months! Much of that can be attributed to a weak or nonexistent onboarding process.

So what’s the best approach when thinking about implementing or revising an onboarding program?

Make It Engaging

Employee engagement is incredibly important for today’s workforce, one that skews younger and expects to be invested and informed when they’re on the job. Unfortunately, many organizations think that onboarding is the same as orientation. It’s not. The focus of onboarding should not be filling out forms or reading the employee manual. The purpose of onboarding is to connect new hires to the mission, values, culture, and people that comprise the organization. It should be focused on the future, to usher new hires into the company ecosystem while ensuring they have the knowledge and comfort level to make an immediate impact. Make sure that your onboarding process is interactive, comprehensive, and consistent with your company values and vision.

Make It Mobile

If your new hires are sitting in cubicles filling out paperwork while flipping through a print version of the employee manual, you’re doing it wrong. Best practices for today’s tech-savvy workforce requires a portable, online solution that replicates the way people are used to engaging. That means onboarding tools should be available anywhere and anytime, even before a new hire’s first day in the office. Invest in an online system that keeps participants moving through and provides feedback as well as completed items and next steps.

Make It Collaborative

As mentioned earlier, the transition from recruiting to onboarding is often handled poorly, or not at all. Take some tips from this article and make sure HR, front-line managers, and trainers are all involved in the creation and execution of the onboarding process. An important takeaway is that onboarding should be personalized to address the relative strengths and weaknesses of new hires. Even if you’ve found the ‘perfect’ candidate, there is always room for improvement. Your cross-functional onboarding team should examine every incoming new hire to address any shortcomings right at the start. This takes more time upfront but will pay huge dividends down the road.

Make It Part of Learning

Extending onboarding into learning and development programs is a great way to connect new hires to corporate initiatives. This will get new hires up to speed quickly and able to make an immediate impact. Ideally, recruiting, onboarding, and training are all hosted on the same platform, to provide a seamless experience. But however it’s delivered, tying the onboarding process to learning management processes will improve the productivity and morale of incoming staff.

The best way to improve retention, increase productivity, and impact the bottom line is to invest in an effective onboarding process. Aligning onboarding with other staff-centric systems and processes will ensure that new hires get started off right.

 

Hoops creates an engaging onboarding process that gets new hires productive from day one. Give us a call at (877) 262-7358 and in 15 minutes we’ll show you how.

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