Amidst the pandemic, the hiring market is already tense. And the next wave could be worse than the second wave situation. So, employing efficient ways to onboard employees help the organization to ensure sustainability. According to Brand Hall Group, preeminent research, and analyst firm, organisations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. New employee onboarding is the key process to acquaint a new employee with the internal culture, provide all necessary tools and information to build a long-term association.
This is an ongoing strategic process that starts with finding a hire to settle them in their job role. This isn’t as shallow as an orientation program.
Imagine how it would feel if, after laying the groundwork right (searching for, identifying, interviewing, and recruiting the right talent), your hire quits or accepts the competitor’s offer or what if a candidate accepts an offer, confirms the joining date, and suddenly doesn’t show up? This can be heartbreaking for the HR teams!
The question is whether creating a structured new employee onboarding process will have a positive impact on new hires? Would it augment employee engagement, invoke a sense of loyalty, and improve employee retention? And more importantly how to build a new employee onboarding process
What is employee onboarding?
Much before an employee onboarding process begins, sourcing good candidates is a must. Employee onboarding processes can vary from one organization to another. Ideally, a successful onboarding journey helps to transform a potential hire into a productive one. This mainly involves familiarizing your new employees with the workplace, company policies, and cultural values.
Let’s take a deeper dive into what encompasses a new employee onboarding journey and how you can get it right.
What is the Employee Onboarding Process?
Step 1: Releasing the offer
An employee onboarding journey typically begins when employees are first selected. After that, offer letters, policy documents, onboarding forms, and other papers are extended. Keeping clear and transparent communication will help gain their trust in the new work environment. Today, with the help of AI-powered platforms, it’s much simpler and faster to verify and onboard good talent. iBRIDGE by AuthBridge is an end-to-end employee onboarding solution to scale at ease, hire quality hires, drive business growth, and enable seamless onboarding. This helps reduce the onboarding time by 90%.
Step 2. Offer acceptance
After an offer is shared with the candidate, the next step is acceptance. At this very stage, your company initiates a telephonic call or meeting to set out organisational expectations and review company policies, procedures, benefits, etc. We believe in keeping a proactive approach towards engagement. This is a vital element to improve employee retention and reinforce strong relationships thereby strengthening the employee onboarding process. These days digital signing products are gaining popularity to electronically sign, manage, and store documents. SignDrive by AuthBridge is a 100% contactless solution to digitally keep up and secure your business documents in the most compliant way.
Step 3. Waiting period
When there’s a gap between the job offer and the date of joining, it’s important to keep your new joiners engaged. A pre-planned strategy must be devised prior to taking them in. This will help to keep their motivation levels high while creating a healthy relationship. This is an important step while creating the onboarding process.
Step 4. The day of joining
The first day of joining is always special. It’s a good time to make them feel excited and happy at the same time. As an HR, it’s important to build a sense of belonging among the new hires.
Step 5. Liaison within departments
Whenever a new employee joins, it’s recommended to introduce the new hire within all departments and help them understand the business better. A short meeting can help to feel more connected to the organization and its people. This opens the internal communication channel for the new person and enables them to do concrete work from the get-go. The teams can be IT, HR, etc. along with topline managers.
Step 6. Training & orientation
Another important step in the way is to share insights related to the company culture and the role and responsibilities. This is great to understand the overall vision and short-term goals of the organization. This is also the right time to set specific goals for the new employee in the next 30, 60, or 90 days.
The first few pieces of training can fill in the employee to pick up and start concrete work without any pitfalls.
Technology can offer opportunities to take a candidate-centric approach and create a highly profitable unit. With the introduction of innovative analytics tools, SaaS software, and AI-based chatbots, candidate journeys will be fully customized. The next generation of HR needs to create a holistic, data-driven approach to modernize itself with robust tools and technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Augmented Analytics, etc. to collect, process, and analyze data within the HR tech stack and arrive at strategic decisions.
