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You may have provided a stellar recruitment service to attract and select the ideal candidate, and you're delighted they've verbally accepted, but how smooth is your onboarding experience?
Are you optimising engagement, providing a tailored experience, streamlining how you collect documents all while retaining the human touch?
In this insight, we share ideas for making candidates feel part of the team from the off and looking at how a tailored onboarding experience based on role type is easier than you think!
Online onboarding
Firstly, we are referring to onboarding being an online experience. Paper-based onboarding just doesn't cut it these days. The benefits of online onboarding are vast - increased accuracy, speed, greater compliance, a more personal and authentic experience and of course, cost savings.
Onboarding for employees can feel overwhelming as candidates get to grips with all of the requirements while preparing for their first day with you.
But onboarding is not a 'one-size-fits-all' process. For example, consider the needs of external candidates versus your internal hires, promotions and so on. Furthermore, onboarding needs to be personalised for the specific type of role, position or function within your business.
A flexible onboarding process
Providing recruitment teams and those involved with the onboarding process with the ability to create multiple tailored onboarding journeys is empowering. The more flexible you can make the processes the better.
New hires can include internal hires, graduates, executives, consultants, permanent, interim, or combination. Creating a tailored experience that matches the type of candidate you are hiring for can personalise how you make the candidate feel part of the team from the get-go.
Eploy recommends flexible workflows that put candidates through different processes that are easy to set up and adapt as required—for example, including appropriate steps such as professional registrations and checks and verifications.
Some customers we work in the health and social care sector have different onboarding journeys depending on whether the position is for a volunteer or care role, or if the role is internal or external. For example, for new hires, you would ask for bank details, referees, next of kin etc, but for an internal hire these steps would likely be unnecessary.
Other customers have designed two-stage onboarding. Initially, they capture only the essential details needed to get a candidate on board quickly and then follow up with more detailed information and contractual obligations later. Alternatively, you might consider multi-staged onboarding where successful candidates' information and initial offer are issued before a later stage where visa and passport checks occur.
The personal touch
Having touched on the process and importance of flexibility within your ATS & E-recruitment system for flexible onboarding workflows, just as important is the human touch. Whether that be adding video content to welcome new employees, an introduction message from the CEO or Department – even issuing induction packs relevant to the new starter role.
By automating and remove the pain points for new employees and onboarding teams, not only will you save printing costs, postage, time and issues with missing paperwork and delays to start dates, but reduced time spent on recruitment too.
Checkpoints:
Ask those who have been through the onboarding process what it is like – feedback is essential.
Define your start and end points of onboarding and extend this to integrate with your HRIS & Payroll solutions for a seamless process and reduce admin.
Check if you can securely share documents and receive responses through customisable online forms that you can include anywhere in your onboarding workflow.
Is sensitive information fully encrypted, giving you peace of mind when gathering financial and other info?
How good is your onboarding reporting? Can you share reporting dashboards to drive the right activity and avoid delays? Can hiring managers access a candidate's onboarding status and view supporting documents?
Take a look at this must have features summary for onboarding.
Case Study
Read how Sunbelt Rentals reduced delays at offer stage, automated reference collection and once a candidate commences in post their details are automatically exported to the Payroll Team.
