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.
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!
The Reason We Need to Take Onboarding Seriously Research shows that new hires decide in the first six months whether to stay with your organization or not. START READING By implementing a solid onboarding process employers can improve new hire retention by 82%! Your...
The importance of the onboarding process cannot be overstated. The steps your company takes will set the tone for the overall employment experience for each new hire. A positive onboarding experience can also lead to improved job performance, increased efficiency, and better satisfaction, which all play a role in engagement and retention. If you’ve been using an unstructured approach and want to improve it, this post is for you.
What is Employee Onboarding?
Employee onboarding is the process of assimilating the new hire into your organization. It includes transactional operations and person-to-person engagement. When building onboarding process steps, include the following:
Paperwork – gather tax forms, contact details, direct deposit, benefits, eligibility online, certifications and licensing such as CDL
Planning – create a plan that’s organized and deliberate with frequent check-ins
Introductions – connect new hire with team and broader workforce
Questions – make it easy to ask questions via virtual channels
Shadowing – video conferencing or other means for live but not necessarily in-person, on-the-job training
Team building – offer formal and informal ways to build rapport and common cause
Office equipment and software – procure and set up equipment
Meeting participation – set up Slack, Teams, calendars, video conferencing, etc.
Face-to-face – meet regularly but not necessarily in person
How Onboarding Can Make or Break the Employee Experience
The quality of onboarding influences everything that comes next! If your hiring process was effective, your new hire starts with high expectations. They are eager to dive in. Effective onboarding meets the expectations of an employee who had a great recruiting process. It continues to shape the employee experience.
Best practices for onboarding include creating a process that:
Is structured
Is personal and tailored to the new employee
Establishes brand loyalty
Helps the new hire be successful
Improves collective team morale
Unstructured employee onboarding can dampen employee engagement quickly. A too-short onboarding process can leave the new hire unprepared to perform their job.
The purpose of onboarding should be setting new hires up for success and decreasing the time it takes for them to become comfortable in their new roles. This only works if onboarding processes are designed strategically with the end goal in mind. But onboarding has become even more challenging with the rise of remote and hybrid work.
The Aberdeen Group (a market research firm) reports sobering statistics about the state of onboarding:
31 percent of new employees have quit a job after less than six months
53 percent of employees said they could do their job better with improved training
Only 32 percent of employers have a formal onboarding program
6 percent of self-labeled “disengaged” employees said they got poor training or no training at all
5 percent of new employees said they didn’t understand what was expected of them until they had worked 90 days or more
In 2019, Gallup reported that only 12 percent of employees strongly agreed that their employer does a great job of onboarding. In the study, researchers identified five common onboarding problems:
No one takes ownership of the process
Onboarding is too short
Onboarding doesn’t reflect the company culture
New hires don’t see a future at the organization
The onboarding process is unremarkable
Employee Onboarding Begins Before the Hire
Well before you can onboard a new employee, you need to create a position listing that generates interest and encourages top talent to apply. Think about what a potential new hire would want when creating job descriptions and establishing parameters.
Consider Benefits and Pay Scale
Compensation and benefits are two of the top priorities among jobseekers. If your organization’s benefits are lackluster, you could lose out on talented individuals who seek employment elsewhere. Low pay is also a reason to walk away from a potential position or offer. Make sure your positions are competitive in terms of what employees receive and how those benefits compare to what they could get working elsewhere.
Review Interviewing and Hiring Practices
Consider how your company will conduct interviews with top candidates and handle other steps in the hiring process.
In-office vs. Virtual Interviews
Interviewing is a key step in the hiring process, as it allows those involved to get to know the potential employee and what they would bring to the role. Similarly, an interview offers the candidate the opportunity to understand the expectations, culture and work atmosphere. You may choose to conduct interviews in person, especially if you’re hiring for an in-person role. But if you’re seeking candidates from various locations or hiring for a remote position, a video interview can certainly suffice.
Offer and Acceptance Letters
When you find your ideal candidate, the final step is making an offer. It’s best to provide an offer letter that outlines pertinent details in writing, such as the position title, expected work schedule, compensation, and benefits. Your offer letter template should include next steps and a place for the individual to indicate their acceptance of the offer and include their signature.
Your Employee Onboarding Checklist
Proper onboarding doesn’t happen by accident. Like any HR workflow, you need a list of tasks and a way to make sure everything gets done. With the right steps in your process, you can ensure the onboarding process checks all the boxes.
Preparing for a New Employee’s First Day
After the offer is accepted, you can start the onboarding process to help your new hire feel prepared for their first day. A digital new hire portal is key for this step. A two-way system allows the manager and HR team to share documents, which the new hire can review, sign and return.
Carefully Plan the Schedule
Your next step in the onboarding process is creating a schedule for the new hire. This plan should outline who the new employee will meet with and how they will spend their time over the first few days on the job. Provide the schedule digitally and, if the new hire will work in person, print a copy and place it at their workspace.
What Equipment and Supplies will be Needed?
It’s also essential to plan ahead to ensure your new hire has what they need to succeed from day one. This step demonstrates the importance of every employee and their needs while allowing them to get up and running upon arrival.
Prepare the computer, mouse, monitor, workspace, and any other equipment and supplies they might need in advance of the first day. You should also prep any tech-related must haves, such as a mobile or desk phone, tablet, and access to shared devices and drives.
How Can You Go Above and Beyond on the First Day?
If you want to really make your new hire feel excited about their new role, go above and beyond to make the first day more meaningful. Produce a company-branded welcome kit that outlines key information about the organization and their team, along with details about benefits, protocols, and expectations. In-person employees may also feel extra special if you host a team lunch, where members of the department can get to know each other in a more laid-back setting.
What Communications Should Occur Between Acceptance and Start Date?
As soon as a new hire accepts an offer, communication can begin. Create a letter that welcomes them to the organization and directs them to a point of contact for questions or concerns. If your new hire does have questions, follow up with a phone call to make sure they got answers. You could even put together a video that welcomes the new hire to the team or collect encouraging, positive messages from their co-workers to share prior to their start date.
New Hire Orientation
The next phase of onboarding involves orienting the employee in their role and with the organization overall. Explore the steps involved in new hire orientation.
Welcoming a New Employee
Help your new hire feel welcome by having their workspace ready for their arrival. If you’re welcoming a remote hire, greet them with a video or phone call. Make sure their team knows when they’ll be arriving so they can say hello and help them feel excited about the new role. It may be worth assigning an onboarding buddy to serve as a companion, guide and go-to for questions during their first week.
It’s also helpful to keep your new hire informed about any in-person needs, such as where to park, any dress code requirements, and how to access the building. Establish their logins and credentials so they can get up and running right away.
Essential Paperwork and Documents
Of course, part of the onboarding process is taking care of business in the form of new-hire paperwork and documents. If possible, send these to the new hire in advance of the first day so they can complete them on their own time. Filling out a huge stack of hand-cramping forms can put a crimp in the flow of onboarding.
Some of the key documents to complete often include:
Tax forms
WOTC forms
ACA forms
Benefits enrollment
Direct deposit and payroll details
Emergency contact information
Safety instructions
Timekeeping instructions
Employee Handbook: Policies and Procedure Orientation
An employee handbook is a key element of any onboarding process, as it outlines the information covered and allows employees to reference it when needed. Take a few minutes to orient the employee to the handbook, focusing on where to find specific topics and details. You may choose to go through the entire document together, depending on time and how you want the meeting to flow.
Your company’s employee handbook should outline business objectives, expectations, and policies and procedures that apply to all team members. It can also include logistics of employment, such as pay periods and paydays, work hours and scheduling details, and any timekeeping requirements.
Team Orientation
Orienting a new hire to their team is just as important as orienting them to the organization, if not more so. After all, their team members will be the people they interact and collaborate with on a daily basis. Think about how you could help the new hire feel welcome in a positive and exciting way. You might schedule a team lunch or outing to help everyone feel comfortable and relaxed outside the office.
Orientation Checklist
Here’s a quick wrap-up of what to include in your orientation process:
Greet the employee (in person: in the office lobby or at the front door, remote: video or phone call)
Provide an office tour, pointing out key spaces: workspace, break room, restrooms
Review key documents (if you provided new hire paperwork in advance, you can collect the completed documents)
Review policies and procedures (employee handbook, benefits and enrollment options, safety regulations, rules around technology and equipment usage)
Answer questions (establish a key point of contact for questions)
Schedule a team get-together (lunch in or out of the office, outing outside of work)
Things to Consider
Starting a new job is overwhelming. Think about how you can make it less so for your new hire. For example, you might include 15-minute breaks throughout the day to allow them to decompress and go through what was covered during the previous training session.
Don’t forget to assign an onboarding buddy to your new employee. Having someone the new hire is familiar with and feels comfortable asking questions can make a big difference in the overall experience.
Ongoing Training and Checkpoints
After the first few weeks, your employee should start to feel more settled and established in their role. But the process doesn’t end after that happens. Explore some of the key tasks to tackle as the employee settles into their duties.
Have a Clear Plan for the First Few Months
One mistake that many hiring managers make is failing to create a plan or schedule beyond the first couple of days. It’s unlikely your new hire will know exactly what to do after meeting with team members and training for a week. Make sure to outline a clear plan for the employee’s first few months in their role. Taking this step will keep everyone on the team aligned while helping the new hire understand what they’ll be responsible for in the coming weeks.
Regular Training for New Role
Ongoing training and development are among the most-requested benefits, as many employees want to improve their skills and continue to move upward in their careers. Offering regular training can help satisfy this need in a way that also benefits the organization. A more skilled employee can take on new responsibilities and oversee other team members while remaining loyal to the organization. It’s a win-win, so think about how your company can offer additional training opportunities.
Team Integration and Collaboration
Depending on the culture of your organization, you may choose to spend extra time integrating the new hire into the team and encouraging collaboration. Businesses with more collaborative cultures tend to benefit from additional ways to integrate, such as spending time together outside of work and getting to know team members on a more personal level. Other factors to consider when deciding how to handle this are the personalities of members of the team, personal responsibilities that may take up their free time, and how different roles will work together.
Collect Feedback to Improve Processes
As you move through the steps in the onboarding process, make sure to request feedback all along. It’s impossible to improve a process if you’re not aware of what people like and dislike about it. If you feel you aren’t getting honest responses, consider creating a survey that allows people to respond anonymously.
Outline Potential Career Path for the Future
Another aspect of bringing a new hire onboard is looking at how they can move up in the future. For most members of the workforce, the option to progress is important. Outlining progression paths and opportunities can also boost employee retention, loyalty, and productivity.
Ongoing Onboarding Checklist
Stick to this checklist with each employee, even after the initial onboarding process is complete.
Schedule regular check-ins (set aside chunks of time regularly throughout the first 90 days to see how things are going and find out if they need anything)
Assign training for their job tasks (provide them what they need to succeed)
Identify paths for progression (employees who want to move up tend to be motivated by clear paths)
Request feedback (you can’t make improvements if you don’t know what works and what doesn’t)
Best Practices for Perfecting Your Onboarding Process
As you continue to refine your company’s onboarding process, you can incorporate these best practices.
Onboarding Process Should be Consistent and Documented
Regardless of role or department, every new hire at your organization should have a consistent experience when coming onboard. Make sure your managers and leaders have access to a checklist used across the company, and a clear understanding of the expectations when bringing on a new hire. Document each step in the process and maintain that documentation in the employee’s personnel file.
Regularly Collect Feedback for Improvements
As mentioned, you need feedback to understand where you can improve the process. Throughout every step of the onboarding process, make sure to ask new hires what they liked and disliked about the experience. You may find that certain steps aren’t as necessary, while others would benefit from expansion.
Utilize Onboarding Software for a More Efficient Experience
An all-in-one software solution can make a big difference in the overall onboarding process. Using this type of solution keeps everyone involved and provides a digital space to keep records. It’s even more efficient if your hiring software includes onboarding features, as the data will flow from the initial application to the onboarding process without the need for manual entry.
Good onboarding tech is invaluable. With onboarding software like ApplicantStack Onboard, you can import new hires from your ATS into your HR system once. The data flows from the initial application to the onboarding process without the need for manual entry. Within the Onboard module, you can build customized onboarding checklists for each job position or work location.
Elevate Your Employee Onboarding Process
Exceptional onboarding can be an important competitive advantage and the benefits will compound over time. If your company doesn’t have an applicant-tracking system in place, ApplicantStack can help your team streamline the onboarding process and provide a better experience for new hires.
Basic Onboarding Checklist
Before First Day
Send welcome email and new hire paperwork
Ask new employee if they have any questions and answer them with a phone call
Share company information
Company directory
New hire’s email address and login information instructions and login credentials for company software
Notice of upcoming company events
Employee handbook
Provide new hire paperwork–specify which documents need to be signed and returned along with the due dates for completion
Tax forms
WOTC forms
ACA forms
Benefits enrollment
Direct deposit and payroll details
Emergency contact information
Employee handbook review
Policies and procedures
Safety instructions
Timekeeping instructions
Set up all necessary equipment
Get the employee’s computer, mouse, monitor, etc., ready
Prep any tech-related must-haves (mobile or desk phone, tablet, access to shared devices and drives, etc.)
Job training
Send email with links to training documents or videos
Share schedule for the first week (or longer)
Outline projects and goals for first month (or longer)
Assign an onboarding buddy to be a companion and guide during the first week
Send email with parking and building access info, reminder of dress code (if applicable), and work schedule
Notify all staff of the new employee and the day they will start
Establish any necessary logins and credentials
Assign onboarding tasks to appropriate people and monitor progress with your onboarding checklist
Create schedule so each team member can meet with the new hire during the first week
Plan get-to-know-you activity with new hire and their team
On the First Day
Greet the employee
Provide an office tour
Point out key spaces: workspace, break room, restrooms, gym (if applicable)
Review key documents (if you provided new hire paperwork in advance, you can collect the completed documents)
Employee handbook
Benefits and enrollment options
Safety regulations
Rules around technology and equipment usage
Provide a welcome gift: company-branded water bottle, apparel, office supplies, etc.
Answer questions
After the First Day
Assign small projects to new hire to help build confidence
Schedule regular check-ins
Set aside chunks of time regularly throughout the first 90 days to see how things are going and find out if they need anything
Assign training for their job tasks
Request feedback
Maintain communication between HR, hiring manager and mentor to discuss new employee’s progress
Check out other posts in our How to Hire Employees series:
5 Ways ApplicantStack Onboarding Can HelpYour Business Level-Up Start onboarding smarter and more effectively today! START READING Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Good Onboarding Onboarding is a prime opportunity for employers to win the hearts and minds...
