How do you know you’ve covered everything you need to do with a recently hired employee? You can read guides and take lessons, but at some point your process needs to be unique. It’s up to you to make sure you can move from step to step without having to think about it. The best way to make sure you don’t miss a beat in the onboarding process is by creating a new hire process flow. A process flow contains all the steps you need to make sure your latest new hire ends up as one of your best. When building a process flow, it’s best to keep these 5 things in mind:
1. Onboarding has to integrate into the new hire process.
This might sound like a no-brainer, but you’d surprised how many companies don’t think about their onboarding procedures until after they hire their employee. When you build the hiring process with onboarding as a key component, it makes it easier to file the necessary paperwork and make sure all required company information has been covered. Onboarding is such an essential part of the hiring process that the University of California Riverside, for example, includes it in their new hire flow chart.
2. Don’t forget about legal.
No one wants to wade through all the forms needed to make sure a new hire’s legally allowed to work for you, but it’s a necessary part of the process. There’s no way around it, but there are a few things you can do to make sure the process is as painless as possible. One thing you can do is ensure your onboarding forms are covered before day one. It’s what as many as 83% of companies in a recent SHRM poll do, and for good reason. When all of these things are taken care of, you’re free to move on to more important matters, like…
3. Introduce new hires to the company
The new hire process puts incredible emphasis on making a good impression. When you take the time to do a proper introduction to the company, you get more successful employees. According to the SHRM survey, 66% of companies have greater success assimilating employees to the company culture when they invest in good onboarding.
4. Plan for a full week.
Chances are your employee won’t know everything about your company after their first day. So, when you’re planning out your new hire process flow, make sure you factor in a full introduction schedule based around the first week. What’s more, make sure you’re not letting employees sit idly for too long. Maynard Webb, Chairman at Yahoo, suggests managers keep tabs on new employees regularly during their first week.
“Take 20 minutes every day for the first week or two to investigate how it is going. You can instantly tell if someone is struggling or succeeding and iterate to make things work more smoothly. Always ask, ‘What do you need from me?’”
5. Be a forward thinker.
When writing up your new hire process flow, don’t write “and then we’re done” anywhere on it. Onboarding is the process of teaching the intricacies of the job an employee has been hired to do. Typically, that takes a lot longer than one week to accomplish. Since employees who went through a structured onboarding program are 58% more likely to stick with a company for more than three years, you can plan milestones and yearly goals with confidence. Give your new hires something to aim for on a regular basis, whether it’s being more productive or getting a big project off the ground before the end of their first year.
There’s more to onboarding than these five steps, especially when you start breaking them down (just how do you introduce an employee to your company culture, anyway?). Let Click Boarding help get you started. Our employee onboarding software can be your recruiting team’s personal flow chart to help track and manage the onboarding steps from the time an offer is sent to a candidate to their first day. Contact us for a demo to see how we can help!
