What's the interplay between the onboarding process, and employer brand?

Competition to not just attract key talent, but retain it, is a pervasive issue that looks to persist into the current year and beyond. Regardless of industry or company size, it’s clear that, as the demographics that make up the workforce continue to shift and change, making employer brand felt in the earliest stages of employment is a fundamental need, which can transform a company’s talent prospects.

For example, a recent survey shared by CNBC found that one in three prospective candidates have turned down a job offer because of a company’s bad online reviews. This is before employment has even started. Further to this, recent research from Bersin, Deloitte’s HR insights and services arm, found that a hugely significant 22% of employees leave within the first 45 days of their employment. Within those impactful 45 days, this proportion of your growing workforce has already decided that the business isn’t somewhere in which they have a sustainable future. Of course, it’s worth remembering that on average, it costs double someone’s salary to replace them.

The ’glass house’ effect of modern employer brand

So why are so many employees either turned off from joining a company, or leaving companies so early into their tenure? There are two elements to this answer. The first is that businesses are in a ‘glass house’ environment more than ever before. By this, we mean that sites such as Glassdoor and LinkedIn give a deeper analysis of what a company is like to work for in an easy-to-ascertain format, available to all with an internet connection.

“If you have a poor culture, candidates will know that. They’ll know before you’ve even spoken to them. So, you have to be honest about what they’re signing up to,” Rachel Akili, Group Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at the MAG Airports Group, tells HR Grapevine.

“Even when it comes to the interview stage, there's no point just having somebody who's great at doing interviews and giving off the right impression, if when the colleague turns up on day one, the truth is something completely different. Candidates aren’t stupid. We have to see them as the smart people that they are.”