Employees are the lifeblood of any business, but it’s not always accessible to onboard new hires. There are a lot of challenges and hurdles that come with this process, including employee training, culture fit tests, and even figuring out how much time is needed for onboarding. This article will give you some tips when embarking on your employee onboarding journey. Your recruit has signed the offer letter, which is excellent news! However, the actual labor now starts. Employee onboarding is the last phase in the recruiting process and one of the most critical factors in keeping a new employee. But here is where many businesses fall short—according to Gallup data, just 12% of workers strongly feel that their employers did a good job onboarding them. I’ll show you what an effective onboarding process looks like in this tutorial. You’ll learn all you need to know to get started, whether you’re starting from scratch or wanting to codify an ad hoc approach. Let’s begin with the fundamentals.
What is the purpose of employee onboarding?
Employee onboarding is the honeymoon time if joining a new firm is like getting married. First, of course, there’s the practical side of things, including putting paperwork in order, having essential equipment ready to go, setting up login credentials, and bringing the new employee up to speed on all they need to know to succeed in their job. But the less visible things are just as important: engaging the recruit, providing clear expectations, and familiarizing them with the company, culture, values, and workforce they’ve just joined. If you want to create the groundwork for a positive—and long-lasting—two-way relationship, make your recruit functioning and comfortable as soon as feasible.
Employee Onboarding: The Fundamentals
The primary parts of onboarding vary each firm, based on regulations and processes, but the essential objectives are the same—to give a platform for your new worker to:
- Meet their coworkers
- Recognize the industry
- Recognize their job, duties, and the criteria by which their performance will be judged.
- Obtain all of the materials they need for their task.
At a bare minimum, your onboarding process should involve the following:
Paperwork
The preboarding step begins when your recruit signs their offer letter. This is the period between an employee accepting a job offer and their first day on the job. And it’s the perfect moment to get the formalities out of the way since the last thing you want to do in the first few days on the job is to bury your employee in paperwork. Many organizations utilize recruitment and onboarding software to provide all relevant papers to recruits before their first day, including direct deposit registration, benefits enrollment, and emergency contact information. Later, we’ll look at those tools.
Welcome
When it comes to your employee’s first day on the job, it’s critical to give them a warm and memorable welcome. The first day is more about getting to know each other than exchanging knowledge. Your recruit will likely forget much of the material since there will be so much to comprehend, but they will remember how they felt on their first day for the rest of their career. You may utilize your new hire’s first day to mold those important initial impressions of your business now that the paperwork is out of the way. There’s no need to think extensively—just thoughtful details like a customized welcome package at their desk, a team lunch, and an office tour would suffice. Other formalities may be addressed, such as providing crucial corporate information or getting started with the other fundamental onboarding items listed below. However, don’t expect too much from your recruit on the first day, since adjusting to a new work environment may be difficult.
Setup of Technology
Preboarding may help with some of this, such as setting up login credentials, access to business tools and systems, and installing all of the gear and software your recruit will need. It’s ideal to have everything set up and tested before your employee starts. They shouldn’t have to go back and forth with IT on their first day. However, tech training would be beneficial at this period. On their first day, make sure they’re familiar with your collaborative tools, any role-specific software, and primary email and calendar training (if applicable).
Initial Consultations
To formally welcome your recruit to the organization, one-on-one meetings are essential. In their first few days, you should schedule an appointment with a recruit’s manager and department leaders to offer an overview of the firm and department, team roles, and an opportunity for the new hire to ask questions and understand what’s expected of them. Following that, the recruit should begin meeting one-on-one with everyone they will be working closely with. The manager should offer a list of persons with whom the recruit should schedule meetings and calendar invitations to any monthly meetings, weekly lunches, or daily standups they will be attending.
Legalities
These include items like wage tax dedication paperwork, a scan of the employee’s ID (and, if required, a work permit), and anything else you couldn’t handle off-site during preboarding. The legalities are critical, but I will advise that it’s preferable to take care of them as soon as possible—preferably on the first day.
Social Event for the Team
If not on the first day, this should be done during the first week of your employee’s employment. It’s critical to balance administrative and social responsibilities—no one wants their first few days at work to be entirely about work. A team lunch (or similar enjoyable social event) is an excellent way to demonstrate your company’s human side while also giving your recruit a flavor of the culture. It allows everyone on the team to formally greet your recruit and get to know one another in a casual atmosphere.
Meeting at the End of the Week
Finally, you’ll want to wrap up the onboarding process by asking the recruit how they’re doing, how well they understand their position, if they feel at ease and their plans for the organization. It’s also an excellent opportunity to find out what they thought of their onboarding experience and if they have any recommendations for improvement (if you haven’t already). Their input is crucial to ensuring that we continue to develop. You may provide feedback at any point throughout your employee’s first year, from the end of their first month to the conclusion of their first year—you might, for example, combine onboarding wrap-up with their first annual performance review. However, in general, the sooner, the better.
3 Ways to Make Employee Onboarding Easier
Parts of the procedure may be automated to make your new employee’s first few days and weeks go more smoothly. The finest onboarding technologies save time and generate continuous engagement with your recruits from the moment preboarding starts. Onboarding is owned by the HR department, which is why you’ll find onboarding capabilities in general recruitment software, albeit some have more excellent onboarding features than others. Three of our favorite recruitment systems with the most delicate onboarding features are listed below:
1. Workable
Workable is one of the top recruitment software systems available today, with over 20,000 firms relying on it. It automates the whole recruiting lifecycle, including onboarding, for as little as $99 per month for occasional hires. You may test it for 15 days for free. Check out Workable’s resources for recruiting suggestions, checklists, and templates even if you don’t purchase them. An applicant tracking system (ATS) and comprehensive connections with other Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) are among the onboarding capabilities, allowing you to handle recruiting from start to finish in one platform.
2. Bullhorn
Bullhorn specializes in (and is our top selection for) staffing agency hiring and onboarding. It has an applicant tracking system and a customer relationship management system. Bullhorn Onboarding, electronic document management and tracking software intended to get recruits up and to run fast, also accelerates your customers’ preboarding process. Bullhorn Onboarding gives you a consolidated view of your client’s onboarding operations, as well as an online portal and electronic signature capabilities for all of their workers’ paperwork, as well as secure data storage. Bullhorn’s CRM has all of this built-in. Pricing isn’t provided online, however, a free trial may be requested.
3. Greenhouse
The greenhouse is a recruitment and onboarding solution for more giant enterprises (in-house or agency) that automates the whole hiring process. Greenhouse provides onboarding options for a customized welcome experience, a business resource center, new hire feedback, onboarding performance reviews, and more thoughtful features on top of the essential administrative activities, in addition to a fully integrated CRM for recruitment. Pricing isn’t accessible online, as it is with many other hiring solutions. Request a demo or get a quotation from Greenhouse.
Onboarding Employees: 3 Tips
It’s all in the preparation when it comes to recruitment, and a few minor details may have a significant influence on your workers’ onboarding experience. Here are some helpful hints that you may put into practice right now in your business.
1. Examine Your Current Methodology.
Gathering input from current workers on the current onboarding process is the first step in enhancing an onboarding program—or lack thereof. After all, they have firsthand knowledge of how well it works—or does not work. Even if you don’t have a defined procedure in place, ask what went well and what might have gone better throughout their first few days, weeks, and months. If you already have a structured procedure, consider how it may be enhanced.
You may start the dialogue in either case by sending out a survey or conducting one-on-one or group brainstorming sessions. Ask specific questions in addition to generic ideas for improvement, such as:
- When you joined, were you given accurate information about [company]?
- On your first day, did you feel welcomed? What could have done more to make you feel at ease?
- Did you believe you had a good understanding of your work and what was expected of you at the end of your first week?
- What was your favorite part of your first week here?
- What was the most challenging situation you encountered during your first week or month here?
Because these are potentially hard questions to answer freely, keep the survey anonymous if possible, and make it plain to workers that you welcome constructive feedback and that no one will be punished for being honest. Follow through on this and make sure no one is chastised or retaliated against for providing unfavorable input.
2. Make a plan for your onboarding process.
Onboarding begins well before your new employee’s first day on the job. There’s a lot to accomplish, so planning and mapping out the process from beginning to end might save time. This cycle may then be replicated for each new employee like a well-oiled machine.
Begin by taking a step back and determining what should be included in your onboarding process. Then, use the employee feedback you gathered to your advantage. Consider the following:
- What can be done (as much as feasible) ahead of time on day one? (paperwork, informing team members, prep for day one activities, etc.)
- Everything your recruit needs to get started on the job (who to meet with, feedback surveys, training, first few projects, etc.)
- What you anticipate from them in terms of performance, with precise, verifiable milestones (e.g., [insert job function] strategy accomplished by [date])
Make a list, then find out what goes where. Pay close attention to any jobs with dependencies and get feedback from stakeholders. Even if you currently have an onboarding procedure in place, this exercise can help you identify areas to save time. For example, what jobs may be completed at the same time? For instance, on the first day, you may handle the legalities while your recruit is getting a tour of the company.
3. Make use of checklists.
We’ve concentrated on providing a positive onboarding experience for your recruit so far, but a positive operating experience for stakeholders is also essential. Checklists are helpful because they provide structure and uniformity to the onboarding process and guarantee that all required steps are completed. Because your employee’s onboarding doesn’t end after the first week. A typical mistake I see organizations make is investing a lot of effort into the first week and then allowing the demands of day-to-day work to take over, resulting in the recruit being forgotten. Onboarding, in truth, takes time and, in my experience, always needs more assistance than you anticipate. Until they feel independent, most workers are labeled “new” for at least the first 90 days or longer.
That’s why every organization should have a 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day plan in place for its new hires: a checklist of everything they’ll need during their first 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days on the job. Make one by starting with your onboarding process. Up to day 90, take all of your duties and organize them into a reasonable amount of action items for your employee. If you need assistance, you may look at checklists online. Ensure that the outcome truly represents the job ad your person applied; otherwise, dissatisfied hiring is probable. Yes, each company’s onboarding experience is unique, but every successful onboarding process is well-structured, so take your time. In addition, setting clear expectations may help everyone have a better onboarding experience.
What Should I Do Next?
You’ve made it this far in the recruiting process and have a good understanding of what it takes to get your new employee off to a good start. It’s now time to roll up your sleeves and create a smooth onboarding experience. Start with the suggestions above, then consider utilizing an onboarding tool to standardize and automate your new process. Finally, explore the tools we’ve suggested (or others in our list of top recruiting software if you want to improve your recruiting as a whole). Performance management is another low-hanging fruit to consider when learning how to optimize your new onboarding process. This is a critical extension of onboarding that examines if employees are achieving their expectations. To further automate that process, see our list of the finest performance management solutions.
Frequently Asked Question
What are the 5 Cs of onboarding?
A: These are the five basic steps a company must take to create an effective onboarding process. They are contact, content, connection, context, and completion.
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