Managing onboarding documents isn’t always straightforward. For many, it involves handling uncoordinated paper forms, PDFs and printouts. Some companies have updated their processes to include shared drives and folders in an attempt to adapt to new technological systems. But, if your onboarding document management isn’t seamless and intuitive, it can cause inefficiencies and delays down the line.
In this guide, we’ll list the essential new hire onboarding documentation, establish the importance of these documents and explore solutions for how to manage them effectively.
What are Onboarding Documents?
As an essential aspect of the onboarding process, onboarding documents allow organizations to collect required information and share information that you must make new employees aware of early on in their journey with your company. Often, these documents are presented shortly after a new hire as accepted their job offer or on their first day. The process involves the employee reading, acknowledging and sometimes signing forms to begin their role.
Onboarding documents should cover informative resources about their entitlements, such as benefits and pensions, as well as the institution itself. This can include a layout of the office building, compliance regulations like confidentiality agreements and data security policies. To help you remember the key aspects of onboarding, follow the 5 C’s rule.
The 5 C’s of onboarding are:
Compliance: Policies and regulations
Clarification: Job expectations
Culture: Values and norms
Connection: Networking and relationship building
Check-back: Feedback and ongoing support
New workers might receive onboarding documentation in the form of digital attachments, links to shared documents or physical paperwork. For effective distribution, well-structured administrative systems must be in place that make the task simple for both HR members and the recent hire.
Before considering documentation management, it’s important to understand exactly what new employees need to get off on the right foot. Below, we’ve provided a comprehensive walkthrough of the onboarding documentation required when taking on new hires.
4 Main Types of Onboarding Documents
There are four main kinds of onboarding documents of which to take note when hiring. Make sure to get in touch with your HR team and hiring managers to ensure you have all the essential onboarding documents necessary for incoming employees.
1. Legal Forms
Required legal documents for new hires depend on the country in which your employees operate. For example, U.S. employees on a fixed salary must complete W-4 tax forms. Be sure to provide contractors and other non-permanent employees with information for legal forms within the onboarding documentation. Despite the distinct regional variations, they should cover the employment necessities, including:
Taxes
Healthcare
Working hours
Salary information
Employment eligibility form
Different types of leave (such as paid leave and sick leave)
Criminal background checks
Drug tests
Liability waivers
2. Job-Specific Documents
As part of the onboarding journey, job-specific forms are the main documents you’ll need to deliver to new hires, starting with the transition from candidate to employee.
Job offer letter: An offer letter should provide a brief overview of the new position and formally extend a job offer in writing. Some job offers may include a welcome message, start date, and next steps for new hires, whereas others may await confirmation before delivering this information.
Employment contract form: The employment contract form should outline administrative details surrounding the new position, covering key information such as:
Working hours
Salary
Holidays
Position duties
Company policies
Contract renewal
Termination guidelines
Process manuals: These will provide step-by-step instructions on how to complete various tasks associated with the role. Although process manuals are helpful to new employees, they shouldn’t replace formal training. Instead, they should function as a useful and accessible resource to remind them of what they’ve learned.
Role goals and responsibilities: On top of the other documents, it may be beneficial to provide a document outlining the key responsibilities and details of their new role. This will clearly underscore their main goals and provide best practices for succeeding in the position.
If there’s any information not covered in the job offer letter or employment contract, you can deliver this in another document that details company policies, procedures and expectations.
3. Company-Specific Documents
The internal documents are business materials that support new employees in understanding the organization’s culture, structure and expectations. Internal documentation should aim to establish the process of obtaining company-specific knowledge with a single, clearly laid out platform.
Here are a few ideas to help build an extensive overview of your company’s framework and guidelines.
Employee Handbook:These booklets give insight into the company’s general guidelines, referring to policies and procedures, as well as culture, mission and values. Employee handbooks also help businesses outline any legal procedures. Content can include:
Environmental policies
Ethics policies
Dress code policies
Non-compete agreements
Non-disclosure agreements
Company code of conduct
Your organizational chart: This type of diagram visually displays the managerial hierarchy within the organization. It provides information about various roles, responsibilities and relationships between individuals, which helps new hires identify relevant contacts and familiarize themselves with the team.
Workplace hybridization:Give employees information on their permitted workplace flexibility. Inform them of your company’s hybrid work practices and outline the structure of when they’re able to choose how and where they work.
Policy evaluation forms: Evaluation forms enable managers to assess the strengths, capabilities and progress of their team. Present this to new employees so they’re aware of the assessment criteria.
4. Pay and Compensation Records
Many employment agreements contain payment information and benefits, but this isn’t the case for all contracts. It can be found in other documents, such as:
Pay and compensation plans: Detailed packages that establish an employee’s wages, salary, benefits and terms of payment.
Pension and retirement documentation: Possesses an employee’s social security card information, proof of age, passport images and a full list of previous addresses for proof of identity.
Paid-leave policies: Regulations that entitle workers to paid time off for certain instances, for example, vacation, sickness, family emergency, maternity and grief.
Further pay and compensation documents include:
Direct deposit forms
Healthcare benefit forms
Stock options information
Other benefits documents
When building your policy documents, evaluate which options work best for your business and provide employees with the utmost transparency. This will help support your employee satisfaction.
The Importance of Onboarding Documentation
Official documents underpin a company’s contractual relationship with its employees. Without a formal onboarding process in place, businesses would likely have trouble integrating new hires into their systems and processes, and newly hired employees would struggle to grasp the expectations of their roles and institution. This is certain to cause delays and setbacks that detrimentally impact employee satisfaction.
This documentation mitigates these risks by helping employees manage the realities of their roles, meet targets and obtain full transparency of the services available to them. Additionally, organizations gather the information they require to remain compliant, add employees to the payroll system and enroll new hires into the applicable benefits schemes.
It’s imperative that the onboarding documentation process is streamlined and frictionless to benefit both sides. If not handled appropriately, it can quickly form a bottleneck that impacts business growth, employee retention and the customer journey.
Here are a few ways to level up the onboarding experience for your new hires.
Form a Buddy Program
Forming a buddy system can be a simple way to offer real support for your incoming employees and help them settle into their new teams. A Harvard Business Review study found that new employees assigned a buddy were 23% more satisfied with their onboarding experience compared to those without buddies. After 90 days of working in their new role, results showed a 36% increase in satisfaction.
Assigning a designated employee to answer questions and handle concerns can provide a sense of emotional safety to your new hires. It also gives them a comfortable opportunity to bond with members of the team and integrate into the company.
Optimize Workflows
Onboarding can be an overwhelming and tedious task for both new hires and the HR team. Streamlining workflows to make onboarding more fun and intuitive affirms incoming employees that their company will nurture their well-being. Establishing productivity as your main priority will bode well for your internal brand image.
Make sure your onboarding process doesn’t end after one week. Employees should feel that onboarding is a guided, ongoing journey for seamless integration into their new company, ensuring they’re more than equipped to take on their new responsibilities.
How Do You Manage Onboarding Documents?
Manual onboarding processes lead to vicious cycles of lost productivity and human error. It’s best practice to mitigate this risk by taking advantage of onboarding software. The right solution will keep all your essential documents organized on one comprehensive, secure and easy-to-use platform. That’s where ApplicationStack can help.`
Simplify Onboarding with ApplicantStack by Swipeclock
Utilizing automation capabilities will optimize company time and reduce the number of procedures involved in your onboarding process. Our powerful employee onboarding software lets you:
Manage documents effectively with an extensive onboarding checklist.
Secure important documents with digital employee files.
Streamline the signing stage and reduce physical paperwork with e-signing capabilities.
The Onboard tool is built into our hiring platform that streamlines the entire process of finding and bringing on new hires. Set yourself up for success. Start your ApplicantStack Onboard trial today!
Bringing a new employee onboard is an exciting time for an organization, whether to fill a newly created position or to replace someone who has moved on. But it also comes with some important steps to ensure a positive experience for the new hire. Explore our detailed guide to onboarding that outlines the what, why, and how behind this crucial process.
What is Employee Onboarding?
Let’s start with the what: employee onboarding refers to the process of familiarizing a new hire with the company culture, policies and other details. The purpose behind onboarding is to help an employee feel more comfortable with their role within the company and encourage them to become an effective member of their team.
Boarding a plane can provide a framework for the process. Upon arrival, you typically receive a greeting from a flight attendant or even the pilot, who welcomes you aboard and provides a positive first experience. The flight attendant can direct you to your seat and answer any questions you might have about the upcoming flight.
A new hire should have a similar experience, with someone greeting them upon arrival and serving as their point of contact for questions and concerns. Starting a new job is overwhelming, but proper support goes a long way in alleviating feelings of stress.
Your organization’s onboarding process should seek to achieve the following aims:
Provide guidance about the new hire’s role and responsibilities
Allow the new employee to get comfortable in their work setting, whether in-person or remote
Create opportunities to get to know teammates and each person’s role within the team
Offer insights into the company protocols and policies
Why is Employee Onboarding Vital for Your Business?
The main purpose of onboarding is to create familiarity in new roles while helping newly hired individuals to feel supported, valued and welcomed. Investing in your onboarding process brings many benefits, including reducing the time to productivity, or the amount of time it takes for someone to become familiar enough with their duties to perform them efficiently.
A positive first experience also sets the tone with your company, which can play a role in employee retention and loyalty rates. Employee engagement is another factor impacted by onboarding practices. Failing to onboard someone properly can cause them to feel confused or uncertain about how to perform in their role, resulting in a decline in engagement and productivity.
When your company delivers a smooth and consistent onboarding experience, each new hire gets helpful information they need to do their job. By contrast, a poor experience can encourage an individual to look elsewhere for employment or struggle to become an effective contributor to the company’s goals.
The Benefits of a Great Onboarding Process
As mentioned, a great onboarding process brings many benefits. Review some of the most common ones below.
Increase employee satisfaction and retention
Here’s a statistic that might surprise you: Great onboarding can boost employee retention by 82 percent. According to research performed by the Brandon Hall Group, companies with strong onboarding processes have significantly higher retention and productivity rates. Since turnover is expensive and time-consuming, it’s worth figuring out how to keep your team members.
Employees who are happy in their roles tend to stick around, so this simple process can lead to an increase in both employee satisfaction and retention.
Enhance and instill your organizational culture
The culture of your business influences the atmosphere in the workplace and how team members interact with one another. But if you don’t take the time to educate on the culture when bringing on new hires, they won’t know what to expect. Make sure to include discussions around the organizational culture in your onboarding process. By doing so, you can make sure new employees understand what’s expected and how to collaborate with their teams.
Improve training time and productivity
A strong onboarding process should include plenty of opportunities for training to help each new hire understand their role. According to Glassdoor, newly hired employees need close to 12 months to achieve their full productivity levels. But improving onboarding can decrease the time from hire to full productivity by up to 70 percent.
It makes sense to get your new team members up to speed faster, and doing so can help your bottom line.
Gather feedback for improved processes
The best source of feedback for the success of your onboarding process is the people who are going through it. But without a consistent process in place, you won’t be able to glean much from your new hires. When every employee goes through the same onboarding practices, you can ask what worked and what didn’t, using the information to improve the way you bring on new hires.
The Consequences of Poor Employee Onboarding
Failing to onboard new hires in a consistent and positive way comes with real consequences for your organization. Explore some of the most common drawbacks associated with poor onboarding practices.
Higher employee turnover
High employee turnover is a serious problem that impacts businesses of all sizes and across all industries. Poor retention is expensive and time-consuming, and it can cause employee morale to decline across all teams. When certain employees are constantly left picking up the pieces of high turnover rates, they may look for employment elsewhere. It’s not worth the risk – invest in onboarding and watch retention rates go up.
Confusion and lack of collaboration
When starting a new job, it’s easy for an individual to feel overwhelmed and confused. The goal of onboarding is to mitigate those feelings as much as possible, providing a firm grasp on the person’s role within their department and the company overall. By improving your onboarding process, you can reduce confusion while providing opportunities for collaboration from the start.
Costly mistakes and potential legal issues
Another purpose of onboarding is to demonstrate and outline the company’s commitment to a respectful and positive culture. But failing to do so can cause a drop in the overall culture, potentially leading to employees who don’t understand what’s appropriate. This can create legal issues for your organization, particularly in situations where discrimination or harassment are permitted to go unchecked.
Depending on the industry you operate in, a poor onboarding process can also lead to costly mistakes that impact the company’s standing. For example, financial organizations are subject to strict legal requirements. But if an employee doesn’t understand those requirements and how they pertain to their role, they could make errors that cost your company a lot of money in penalties and fees.
Longer training and lower productivity
A longer and less consistent training process comes with a cost. New employees will take longer to reach peak productivity, which has a direct negative impact on your company’s bottom line.
What Should Your Employee Onboarding Process Look Like?
We have a full onboarding guide with steps and a checklist on our blog, but here’s a look at what a great process should include.
Employee Onboarding Begins Before the Hire
Your process should begin before you bring on the new hire. Identify what steps you want to take when onboarding and create a detailed list for your hiring managers and supervisors to follow.
Pay and benefits
Make sure to assess the pay scale for each position you’re filling and offer transparency about how an employee can move up. You should also consider which benefits a new hire will be eligible for and when they can sign up, covering this information when they come onboard.
Consider interviewing and hiring practices
Before you hire a new employee, you should conduct interviews to determine which applicant is the best fit for the role. Decide whether you’ll host interviews in person or virtually. If the position is remote, a virtual interview probably makes more sense (and saves a lot of money).
Another aspect to think about is how you’ll make the chosen candidate an offer of employment. Do you have an offer letter template that’s ready to go? What about an acceptance letter or form?
Preparing for a New Employee’s First Day
After you have an accepted offer in hand, it’s time to start planning for the new hire’s first day at work. Create a detailed schedule for at least the first week. You can build in short periods of downtime during which the employee can review what was covered in the previous training sessions. Make sure they are meeting with someone throughout most of each day, so they know who to go to for each session.
Figure out what supplies and equipment the new hire needs to do their job and prepare each item. If they need access to shared drives or logins established, take care of these steps before they start. Scrambling to get someone access to a drive or file can make your onboarding process more stressful and impact the person’s feeling about the company overall.
New Hire Orientation
Make sure you orient your new employee to their team and other employees with whom they’ll interact. Complete all necessary documents, ideally online before they start, and go through the policies and procedures outlined in the employee handbook. Take some time to provide equipment training and show your employee how to get into their accounts.
Things to consider:
It’s valuable to put yourself in the new hire’s shoes and consider how they might feel during the first few days of a new job. It’s always overwhelming to begin in a new role, but proper onboarding can lessen those feelings and provide a more positive experience overall.
Assign a buddy to each employee, preferably someone on their team. This person can be the go-to for questions that come up and serve as a source of support during the first few weeks or months.
Ongoing Onboarding
While your formal onboarding process may only last for a few weeks, a new hire should have regular check-ins to make sure they feel confident in their role throughout the first year. Offer ongoing training opportunities and check in on how collaboration is going with their team. Ask for feedback so you can improve the onboarding process for future new hires.
How the Right Software Can Improve Your Onboarding Process
Managing all aspects of the onboarding process manually is a waste of time and resources, especially in today’s digital age. It’s worthwhile to invest in software that makes it easier to find and bring on new hires.
What is Employee Onboarding Software?
Employee onboarding software is designed to improve efficiencies throughout the process of bringing on a new employee. It often has tools that allow applicants to complete their employment paperwork online, as well as a centralized source for finding resources and information.
The Benefits of Employee Onboarding Software
ApplicantStack is a powerful applicant-tracking system that includes robust onboarding tools. These include:
Automated checklists: Assign tasks to users and new hires to create checklists and track progress
Electronic documentation: Allow for the completion of Form I-9, I-4, and other crucial documents electronically
Document storage: Keep all your company’s critical documents, including employee handbooks and signed forms, in a centralized location
Templates: Use existing templates or create your own to keep everyone on the same page
Reporting: Standard and custom reports make it easy to keep tabs on the onboarding metrics
Hire import: Applicant data flows throughout the system, eliminating the need for duplicate data entry on those you choose to hire
Reminders: Automatic reminders keep managers and new hires in sync, reducing the risk of tasks falling through the cracks
When you’re ready to amp up your onboarding process, try ApplicantStack to make sure it goes as smoothly and consistently as possible. You can try it for free, with no strings attached.
When it’s time to bring on a new hire, it can be a challenge to know how to handle compensation. This is especially the case when you’re filling a brand-new position without an established salary range or looking to bring on someone who is more experienced than the individual they’re replacing. Our guide to handling salary discussions in the recruiting process can help you move forward with confidence.
When to Discuss Salary
The first question that often comes up in the hiring process is when to start discussing salary with a potential candidate. The consensus is generally to at least include a range in the job listing to avoid wasting everyone’s time. A potential applicant may not want to take the time to apply for a job if the salary isn’t close to what they expect to earn. Additionally, it wastes the hiring manager or recruiter’s time when reviewing applications and interviewing people who aren’t really interested because of the salary.
Still not convinced? In our recent webinar with Indeed, we discussed some interesting stats with participants. Approximately 12 percent of job postings include salary information (up from 8 percent in 2019), yet more than 60 percent of candidates say that pay is the most important aspect. Your listings can stand out in a sea of competitors when you include pay information, offering transparency that jobseekers will appreciate.
Of course, you don’t have to give an exact number right away. Providing a range or asking the candidate to provide an expected salary when applying helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
How to Discuss Salary
It can also be challenging to discuss salary requirements if you’re not familiar with the process or comfortable talking about numbers. Take some time to familiarize yourself with common salary negotiation tactics and average pay rates for similar positions. The more information you have, the better equipped you’ll be to have a discussion.
Steps to Manage Salary Requirements
Ready to get started? Follow these steps to better manage salary requirements and discussions in the hiring process.
Start with the listing
As mentioned, your salary consideration should start when you create the posting for the open position. Whether you’re replacing someone or creating a new role, do some research on salary ranges in the field and similar positions. You can get a lot of useful information on sites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn, helping to ensure that your range is competitive and will attract top candidates.
Establish a top-end figure
It’s also important to establish a number that represents the very highest you can go for a new hire. Most candidates will negotiate the initial offer, so creating a top-end figure helps to ensure you’re not going over your labor budget in the process.
Be open to discussion
If you’re unwilling to negotiate on salary, a potential hire may walk away as this can signify a lack of flexibility. Candidates may also perceive this action as a knock on what they would bring to the role, such as specific abilities or experience. Be open to discuss the salary and consider what else you can offer if the pay scale is rigid.
Understand where the candidate is coming from
When you’re considering a new job, is salary important to you? The answer is likely yes. So, you can understand where someone else is coming from when wanting to know what to expect in terms of pay.
Try to put yourself in your candidate’s shoes when discussing compensation. This individual is considering a significant change to their situation by taking on a new role and all that comes with such a shift. They also need to support themselves and any dependents they have, so salary is certainly a top consideration when deciding whether to make a professional change.
FAQ about Salary and Hiring
Explore some of the most commonly asked questions from employers around salary details in the hiring process.
Should you include a salary range in your job listings?
Yes, it’s generally recommended to include at least a range in your job listings. New legislation in various cities and states will also require the inclusion of salary data in postings. It’s worthwhile to get in the habit of including it when filling positions, even if your city or state doesn’t require it at this time.
What should you do if a candidate wants to negotiate salary?
When a candidate comes in ready to negotiate salary, the best thing you can do is be prepared. Arm yourself with information and data so you can back up the offered range. It’s also important to be open to discussion. If an applicant has unique skills or extensive experience that will be particularly useful in the role, they likely deserve to sit at the higher end of the range rather than the entry point.
What should you do if you can’t go higher on salary?
Budgets are essential to a successful business. Going way over your established labor budget to secure a top candidate probably doesn’t make sense, especially if you run a smaller company. But you do have options!
Consider other benefits you could offer. For example, you could offer additional paid time off or a more flexible work schedule as a way to sweeten the deal. Other considerations include waiving or shortening the standard waiting period for health benefits, increasing a retirement contribution match, or providing upgraded equipment for personal use.
By taking a careful yet transparent approach to compensation, you can improve your hiring process while attracting more candidates to apply for your open roles.
If you aren’t already background screening your job applicants, you’re probably at least aware of its heightened importance in today’s recruiting and hiring landscape. But what you may not be as familiar with is the intricate network of federal, state, and local regulations impacting background checks and the information employers use to make hiring decisions.
How can organizations like yours continue to find top talent while adhering to the required guidelines? By partnering with the right background screening provider.
With the help of our friends at Verified First, we’re exploring how a background screening provider can help you stay compliant while accomplishing your recruiting goals.
Compliance Requirements Employers Need to Know
With a myriad of regulations that impact background screening, it can feel impossible to keep up. Since these regulations can vary based on a candidate or employer’s location, industry, and even company size, it’s essential to stay current. Some laws restrict the timing of when you can run background checks while others regulate the type of information you can use.
Later, we will discuss how a screening provider can help you manage your organization’s specific industry and location screening requirements. But first, let’s explore some federal guidelines that pertain to all background screening programs.
Fair Credit Reporting Act
The FCRA is a federal guideline that protects the information collected by consumer reporting agencies. The rules imposed by the FCRA include:
Informing a candidate that a background check is being performed
Obtaining their consent before conducting screening.
Employers must also provide applicants with a copy of the report if requested.
Ban the Box and Clean Slate Laws
Ban the Box laws are statewide, aiming to remove barriers to employment for applicants previously convicted of crimes. Ban the Box laws, also referred to as fair hiring laws, impact when an employer can ask about an applicant’s criminal history or run a criminal background check. These laws have expanded to multiple states and individual cities in the recent past.
The EEOC enforces laws that prohibit employers from discriminating against applicants based on race, gender, religion, sexual identity, age, disability, and national origin. This means when making hiring decisions and background screening, you must comply with the federal laws that protect applicants from discrimination.
How a Background Screening Provider Helps Manage Compliance
For many HR professionals who feel overwhelmed by screening requirements, partnering with a background screening provider may be the best way to ensure compliance. Federal laws, such as those outlined above, are likely applicable alongside other state and local requirements. This web of laws grows even more complex if your organization is hiring in multiple locations.
A background screening provider has the knowledge and expertise to manage and navigate the required ever-changing federal, state, and local regulations so you can focus on finding the right candidates. Here’s how the right screening partner can help your organization maintain compliance and streamline hiring efficiency:
FCRA Disclosure and Consent
A background screening provider should manage disclosing background screens and receiving consent from potential candidates, as required by the FCRA. With the Verified First and ApplicantStack integration, you can easily order a background screening without having to leave the hiring platform, and send and receive electronic disclosure and consent forms from applicants. Verified First will also send a copy of the report to applicants, if requested.
If the candidate or job location is in a state with additional disclosure requirements, Verified First can provide the additional state-specific disclosures based on how the screening is ordered.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The right screening partner can help support DE&I practices into your recruitment and hiring process. Here’s how a background screening provider can reduce organizational bias and help you comply with anti-discrimination laws:
Adjudication matrices that show search results relevant to the position
Fast and accurate screening conducted by unbiased specialists
Compliance and legislation monitoring
Adverse Action
There are guidelines for nearly every interaction a company has with their employee — from recruiting and hiring to promoting and even terminating them. These guidelines also apply to how you handle not hiring a candidate based on the results of their background check.
If your organization decides to not hire someone based on this information, you must comply with a process known as adverse action. The right background screening provider will help you handle the adverse action process, including:
A pre-adverse action notice, which allows candidates to review their background check report, provide necessary context, or dispute inaccurate information.
The industry standard waiting period, typically between 5 and 7 days. During this time, you can review the candidate’s response and make a more informed decision.
A final notice, which explains your final hiring decision to the candidate.
Why Verified First and ApplicantStack
Working with a background check provider can help your organization comply with local, state, and federal legislation when hiring and bringing on candidates. Partnering with a screening company can also help prevent applicants from feeling like they were unfairly treated based on inaccurate or incomplete information reported on their background checks.
Via a simple, patented browser extension, you can utilize the ApplicantStack and Verified First integration to streamline talent acquisition from start to finish. With this one-click integration, users can order, review, and manage Verified First’s background screening solutions all within the ApplicantStack platform.
What was it like the first time you boarded an airplane? Was it a memorable experience? Is the memory good or bad?
Even if you’ve never flown before, it’s highly likely that you have an idea of how you’d like the process to go. That’s because whatever people do, they seek positive experiences, which explains why onboarding is an essential part of the employment process.
What is Onboarding?
Onboarding is the process of integrating and orienting new hires into an organization. The standard process to onboard a new employee often begins when a candidate accepts a job offer and continues over the first few weeks or months of work.
We can categorize onboarding into four phases:
Preboarding: In this phase, new employees have already accepted a job offer and completed the necessary paperwork, and are looking forward to starting their first day of work. Here, they would only have basic knowledge of their role in the company and details around company policy, structure, employee benefits, etc.
Welcome: This typically happens on the first day and throughout the first week where the new hire is introduced to current employees and starts to become familiar with the company’s culture, goals and policies.
Training: This stage comes after the first week of work, when the employee may be in meetings, workshops or shadowing sessions, learning new skills and procedures to succeed in their role.
Transition: After four to eight weeks, the new employee should progress from having just a few responsibilities to becoming a full-blown employee.
One of the key things to consider about the onboarding process is that since the pandemic, 71% of organizations have adopted remote hiring. Therefore, it is crucial to know how to onboard a new remote employee. The process and phases of onboarding a remote employee are generally the same as in-person onboarding; however, there are specific things to zoom in on. Here are a few tips:
Set clear expectations.
Offer continuous support.
Create a detailed schedule.
Schedule routine check-ins.
Provide the relevant resources.
Make substantial socialization opportunities available.
The Importance of Onboarding
Employee onboarding is part of talent management, which helps to maintain business competitiveness while increasing employee retention. These are two key metrics for the success of a business. That said, onboarding does play a vital role in the growth and development of an organization as well as its employees.
Let’s look at the key advantages of onboarding:
Fully immerse new employees in the company’s culture: Through employee onboarding, your organization will introduce the culture of the company, and give new hires a chance to learn, adapt to and even decide from the get go if this is the company culture they want to be a part of. People apply for and stay in jobs that align with their personal and professional values and goals.
Offer skills training and development so employees can become effective contributors: By understanding early enough the key things about a company, such as its goals and policies, new employees will discover how to perform their duties effectively and quickly develop the skills needed to succeed in their role.
While these seem to be all in favor of the new employee, keep in mind that the success of an employee is a sign that the company is also succeeding. That’s why it’s crucial to have a well-thought out and comprehensive onboarding process that includes goals for new employees as well as a strategy that will benefit the business.
What Goals Do You Want to Set for New Employees?
A new hire normally has their short- and long-term goals in mind before starting a new job. However, since starting a new role can be stressful, the HR manager or hiring manager of a company should provide onboarding tasks to assist the new hire streamline their goal achieving process. This way, the new staff know what to look out for and can take steps toward seamlessly being a great contributor to the business.
Some simple goals to set for new employees include:
Network and collaborate with staff members.
Meet key performance indicators (KPIs).
Understand the company.
Know their roles.
Master their jobs.
Communicate well.
Meet deadlines.
What to Include in an Employee Onboarding Process?
While new employee onboarding is important, the process is useless if it’s lacking in certain areas or inconsistent across departments and roles. Therefore, it’s best to create and follow a detailed onboarding checklist to meet the expectations of the new hire and the company as a whole.
Benefits of Onboarding
Understanding the benefits of onboarding, both for the employee and employer, can help you realize why it’s so important.
Benefits to the Employee
Promotes a faster transition: An effective onboarding process assists employees in understanding their assigned duties as well as the company’s expectations, allowing them to become engaged and productive quickly.
Increases productivity: Onboarding provides new hires with the information, skills and resources they need to accomplish their job obligations effectively, thus increasing their productivity.
Better motivation: If employees feel welcomed and valued during onboarding, this may boost their motivation, leading to higher job satisfaction.
Builds better relationships: Greater connections and a more supportive work environment can result from onboarding programs that stimulate relationship-building among new and existing employees and managers.
Benefits to the Business
Increases competitive edge: Onboarding helps firms differentiate themselves in the job market by providing a happy and supportive work environment that attracts top talent.
Better employee engagement: Employees who feel engaged and connected to their work, colleagues and the company’s goals and values perform better and are more satisfied with their jobs.
Increases retention rate: Onboarding programs boost employee satisfaction and help reduce attrition rates.
Cost savings: By increasing retention and decreasing turnover, onboarding programs lower the expenses of recruiting, employing and training new employees.
Streamlining an Ideal Onboarding Process
To consider an onboarding process effective, it must display qualities often referred to as the five Cs of onboarding. These include: compliance, clarification, confidence, connection and culture.
Along with these qualities, it’s important to consider the goals of your organization and what new hires may want as they start the next stage of their careers within your company. Generally, they want a mentor or onboarding buddy, a company tour, equipment setup and procedures, a review of company policies and most of all, on-the-job training. By addressing each of these needs, you can truly reap the benefits of onboarding a new employee successfully.
To transition new employees into your organization seamlessly and effectively, AppliantStack has developed game-changing onboarding software that will save you and your HR team time, while improving efficiency. Start your free trial today!
