If you are hiring, congratulations! One of the chief signs business is heading in a good direction is when the company begins or increases the amount of people it is hiring (as long as it’s not due to constantly having to replace people leaving, aka high turnover). In recent years HR experts have the hiring process down to a science so much that they have broken it up into multiple smaller sub-processes. Onboarding is used to describe the process between a candidate accepting an offer of employment and roughly when they begin their first day (or week). Well-managed companies know that the hiring process is very important and onboarding is no exception. Here are some things to avoid when onboarding new employees.
The first thing, is to make sure you are not overlooking the onboarding process. In other words, to make sure you are constantly collecting feedback from new employees on how to make it better, instead of just assuming “it’s just one of those things everyone goes through” and not giving it much thought beyond that. Properly tweaking an onboarding process improves productivity and morale while neglected onboarding processes cost employee retention.
Next, you will want to keep the onboarding process well-documented so it will be consistent and complete. This saves time and money from having to go back and fix things, such as missing access for an employee to an important computer system or the lack of a parking pass that gets a new employee’s car towed. Remember the feedback regarding the onboarding process mentioned previously? That fits perfectly in here with the need to keep the process well-documented.
Make sure you include a sufficient number of people in the hiring process. What is sufficient? Of course that varies widely from company to company and who is being hired. For companies that have thousands of employees, naturally it is not feasible for everyone to be involved in the hiring process. But having a new employee only talk to someone from the HR and legal departments before getting straight to work is also lacking and impersonal. A sufficient number of people is somewhere in the middle; enough to make the new employee feel welcome!
As important as it is to make a new employee feel welcome though, it is also very important to properly equip them with everything they need to do their job. As much of this as possible needs to take place during the onboarding process. Training with other employees on a company’s specialized/proprietary processes naturally will take an extended period of time. But setting up a new employees workstation, giving them proper office supplies, having access to the necessary information systems, and more all need to be handled during onboarding to get the new employee off on the right foot.
The first thing, is to make sure you are not overlooking the onboarding process. In other words, to make sure you are constantly collecting feedback from new employees on how to make it better, instead of just assuming “it’s just one of those things everyone goes through” and not giving it much thought beyond that. Properly tweaking an onboarding process improves productivity and morale while neglected onboarding processes cost employee retention.
Next, you will want to keep the onboarding process well-documented so it will be consistent and complete. This saves time and money from having to go back and fix things, such as missing access for an employee to an important computer system or the lack of a parking pass that gets a new employee’s car towed. Remember the feedback regarding the onboarding process mentioned previously? That fits perfectly in here with the need to keep the process well-documented.
Make sure you include a sufficient number of people in the hiring process. What is sufficient? Of course that varies widely from company to company and who is being hired. For companies that have thousands of employees, naturally it is not feasible for everyone to be involved in the hiring process. But having a new employee only talk to someone from the HR and legal departments before getting straight to work is also lacking and impersonal. A sufficient number of people is somewhere in the middle; enough to make the new employee feel welcome!
As important as it is to make a new employee feel welcome though, it is also very important to properly equip them with everything they need to do their job. As much of this as possible needs to take place during the onboarding process. Training with other employees on a company’s specialized/proprietary processes naturally will take an extended period of time. But setting up a new employees workstation, giving them proper office supplies, having access to the necessary information systems, and more all need to be handled during onboarding to get the new employee off on the right foot.
