How Effective is Your Onboarding Program?
An onboarding program is like a strategic game of chess, but instead of checkmate, you want your newly hired employees to acquiesce to company culture through an easy candidate experience. Other companies make advances towards your king, but you counter every move they make. Ultimately, you check their king in a battle of the candidate experience, and the onboarding process is part of that new hire involvement. There are secrets to the game, and all successful onboarding programs know them well.
1. Ensure candidates know basic company facts
Now, candidates should know the most simple company details such as industry, product or service. But what about company structure? That’s a simple – albeit internal – detail employees and new hires should be made aware of. Even something as straightforward as to why you feel your organization is such a great place to work. In fact, 89% of job seekers want to know your perspective on the matter, so during the onboarding process, make sure they understand the most important and basic features of your organization.
2. Give candidates insight into organizational culture
Often a determinant for accepting a job offer, the onboarding program can also dictate the longevity of an employee. That’s why it’s important to expedite the onboarding process and make it as easy as possible, so they can get out of the legalese and into the culture. Melissa Suzuno, Content Marketing Manager at Parklet, said:
“Cultural fit is not just a fluffy woo-woo topic. Psychologist Natalie Baumgartner attributes 89% of an employee’s success on the job to cultural fit. And in a 2014 study, 43% of companies said cultural fit was the single most determining factor when making a new hire.”
3. Overview of company mission and values
Give employees a synopsis of what your organization stands for, what the mission statement is and what it means to be a part of the inner workings of the company, so they know their fit. Beyond the formalities, whether it’s with company language or processes, employees need to be aware of the culture they’re getting into. Before, during and after onboarding.
4. Identify areas for improvement and adjust accordingly
There is always room for improvement. Whether that means adjusting the spend on onboarding or how you allocate it within the program. But Christine Marino, Click’s Transformation & Strategy Officer, explained the importance of adjusting your program for the sake of improving and simplifying the process:
“This means successful onboarding is about keeping employees around, too. If you don’t buy how important onboarding is to long-term employee retention, consider this: 73% of organizations say the biggest reason they’re revamping their onboarding is not only to get new hires up to speed more quickly, but retain them as well.”
5. Use technology to eliminate redundant processes
Enter Click Boarding. With our technology, you can easily organize new hire paperwork virtually as they fill it out online. Technology is the right hand of the hiring process, so shouldn’t that trickle down into a successful onboarding program? Currently, only 67% of organizations use technology as part of their onboarding strategy, but in today’s business world, that number should be much higher.
6. Set goals from the beginning so new hires know expectations
Why is it so important to set clear expectations from the beginning? Out of the employees who left the company within the first 6 months of their employment, 23% said that clear guidelines about their responsibilities would have changed their decision to leave the job. Give your new hires these guidelines from the beginning as part of your development of a successful onboarding program to prevent untimely resignations.
7. Give new hires a chance to socialize
Bonding with co-workers is a critical part of new hire integration into the work environment. Without a sense of inclusion, it’s difficult for new hires to want to stay. Instead, by creating an onboarding system that automates all of the paperwork, new hires have the time to socialize with coworkers before they’re pushed into their responsibilities.
Like a game of chess, there are strategic moves you can take to ease the onboarding process for your new hires. This places your talent competitors in a challenging position as they fight for the candidates you want. But if you can get them through the onboarding process faster, well, they’ve already signed the paperwork and are beginning their journey of integration into the culture and their new responsibilities.
