When new hires join a company, they expect to adapt gradually to the work culture and learn about their work expectations.
If they’re unclear about the company’s goals, workflows, and processes, they fail to deliver when the real work begins. As a result, they struggle to fit in and find the motivation to work. This is where they anticipate whether to stay or leave the organization.
What does that tell you?
A smooth onboarding process equals higher productivity and retention.
Unfortunately, only 12% of employees in the US feel their company does a good job onboarding new hires. Especially since hiring has gone virtual, it has become even more challenging to acquaint new hires with the workplace and responsibilities.
The good news is—you can turn that around and be among those rare companies by streamlining and automating your onboarding process.
What does an onboarding process look like?
Typically, there are four stages of an employee onboarding process.
1. Pre onboarding
The onboarding process kicks off as soon as the candidate receives their offer letter. This is where you break the ice by introducing the company and helping them relax amid the nervousness of joining a new company.
The processes involve:
- Sending out paperwork such as NDA, contracts, tax information, and so on
- Assigning them an onboarding buddy they can reach out to on the first day
- Helping them with the necessary information to prepare for the joining day
- Preparing welcome kits with goodies to make them feel welcomed
2. First-day onboarding
This is where you show them around, introduce them to the team, conduct orientation and discuss the work culture in your company.
The process usually lasts for a week or two, helping the new hire adjust to the new workplace.
3. Training and transition
The most exciting thing about joining a new team for employees is when they learn about their projects and their role in them. Your job as an HR is to reduce the overwhelm by making this transition as smooth as possible.
This includes:
- Conducting job-specific pieces of training for the employee
- Getting them familiar with the product or services they’ll be working on
- Helping them set their performance goals
- Setting the foundation for the times ahead
4. On-going development
They say learning never stops. Even for employees that have been with your for a long time, you must let them know that you’re invested in their careers.
- Provide them trainings to upskill
- Help them set their career goals
- Get a deep understanding of their current skillset and performance
Why you need an onboarding software
Onboarding new employees manually isn’t a cakewalk.
There are tons of processes involved, including:
- Sourcing potential candidates from job sites
- Shortlisting those with relevant skillset
- Conducting interviews
- Shortlisting and inviting candidates to the next stage
- Welcoming new hires
- Making them feel at home
Not to mention the endless amount of paperwork that goes into each step, from recruitment to onboarding. Now, imagine being drowned in the sea of data from each candidate collected throughout their onboarding process, which usually lasts up to 3-6 months.
On top of that, you have other responsibilities, such as attendance, reporting, appraisals, leaves, payrolls, and asset management to take care of. Handling them all manually would only be a recipe for disaster.
An onboarding system is what you need to reduce this overwhelm and bring agility to your day-to-day operations.
Here are seven reasons to invest in an onboarding software.
1. Saves time with pre-built templates
Onboarding software can help you eliminate many redundant tasks such as typing appointment letters, scheduling interviews, sending out offer letters, and so on. Not only do you manage and access every onboarding detail for all new hires in one place, but you also save a lot of time with the pre-build templates provided by the software.
All you need to do is look for a template for a particular, edit the names and essential details and send it out to multiple employees at once.
Moreover, it helps eliminate the need for repeated uploads and downloads of letters by supporting digital signatures.
2. Helps in making better hiring decisions
Looking through hundreds of applications and sourcing new talents from a job board can be tiring. After all, there’s only so much an HR team can handle manually to find the best talents for their company.
A bad recruitment process sets a negative tone for the employee for future experiences with the company. As per research, about 49% of respondents declined a job offer due to poor recruitment experience.
Onboarding software helps you send job postings across multiple portals and screen candidates through a centralized applicants’ database system. The software ranks and filters candidates based on their skill set automatically.
Additionally, you can create, schedule, re-schedule, or cancel interviews all in one portal based on the role you’re hiring for.
3. Engages and nurtures new hires
New hires are curious, energetic, and super-charged for their new role—and you want to live up to their expectations of being the ‘ideal’ workspace. Luckily, an onboarding software does that and build employee engagement from day one.
Give your new hires the steering wheel by implementing a self-service facility while you set up other essentials for them. Offer them a platform where they can see all their information and edit or modify it if required. Hook them up with information about the organization’s goals, events, payroll and leave information, their teammates’ information, benefits and perks, and more.
4. Helps in offering a great candidate experience
Having trouble knowing the status of your onboarding forms? No problem—an onboarding software helps you send automated reminders to new hires and show you the exact progress made so far.
This helps fast-track the process and quickly finish ‘boring’ formalities, so they can quickly get to the juicy part—knowing the job inside out. As a result, with everything moving quickly and after being introduced to the project, your new hires find themselves even more productive at the new workplace.
5. Seamless document management
It can be very frustrating to cram through your inbox all day to find a piece of information. Sounds familiar?
HR professionals are easily the victims of information overload, as they’re often bombarded with new employee data. Finding the right information at the right time is always challenging if everything is stored manually on local folders or drives.
An onboarding software helps you collect and store information in the most secure way possible. It helps you structure and organize every piece of information you collect in designated fields that you can later search using filters.
Access management allows you to provide and restrict access rights to control who can view or edit a document. The best part is that everything is taken care of and stored in one unified platform that makes navigating and finding information easy.
6. Accelerates the revenue growth
The cost of employee turnover is at an all-time high, which means it’s more important than ever to ensure an exceptional onboarding experience for new hires. An onboarding software helps you maximize retention in your company and keep your new and old hires happy and engaged.
The key is to make them feel welcome and valued and extend help and guidance in every step of their journey with you. When onboarding a new hire, make sure you’re presenting your company’s goals and how they can contribute to them. Moreover, it’s important to showcase your company culture and present them with exciting opportunities they can upskill from.
This is something onboarding software helps you automate with email notifications and alerts to keep them updated and informed.
7. Lesser mistakes and more compliance
Compliance is a crucial component of onboarding new employees. Often, manually handling tons of data at once can result in small or big errors in processing. After all, human errors are bound to happen with redundant and monotonous tasks.
However, failing to record important data, documents, and letters can cause serious compliance problems and result in hefty fines.
With automated onboarding software, there’s little to no chance of missing anything. Everything is managed through the portal, where your employee data is protected and secured from prying attackers.
Onboarding software: a boon for virtual hiring
A smooth onboarding process improves new hire retention rates by 82%. Moreover, it’s pleasant for you and your new hires to have everything done and managed with a breeze.
However, with hybrid work culture booming, it’s more essential than ever to invest in an onboarding software. It helps you manage the onboarding process despite the distance and make your new hires feel connected and engaged throughout the process.
More so, it’ll help you ensure they aren’t lost, demotivated, and overwhelmed at the beginning of their new journeys.
Author’s Bio
Deepali is an engineer-turned-freelance writer for B2B SaaS, writing actionable long-form content for marketing, Cybersecurity, and HR-Tech companies. When she’s not writing, she’s engrossed in a cozy murder mystery novel with a cup of hot chocolate!