For digital natives and millennials, consumer-grade efficiency and insta-communication is the norm. Unsurprisingly, they have high expectations in how they manage their working lives. By 2020, this generation will make up 50% of the global workforce. How should employers respond?
Offering a high-quality experience is important throughout the employee lifecycle, but particularly during the onboarding stage. Social media, web and mobile applications, cloud-based tools and talent acquisition software make this much easier to achieve. Smart career sites, which incorporate a range of these technologies, can deliver both a consumer-grade experience and sophisticated date insights, boosting talent acquisition sophistication and success.
Providing a comprehensive onboarding programme means 58% of new joiners will stay at least three years. Organisations often think strong employer branding, supported by an effective talent acquisition strategy, is all they need for retention, but this isn’t always the case.
Recent Cielo research found:
- Only 40.4% of respondents said they have a robust onboarding plan
- 42.3% have an onboarding plan for just some of their roles
- Nearly 20% lack any formal onboarding plans
Successful onboarding is challenging and can take a great deal of resources. If you are creating or re-evaluating your onboarding process, consider the following:
1. Integrate your values. They should be emphasised to help the new joiner understand the culture and visualise their future experience. Tying them back to why the employee was hired will help ensure their success and productivity. Your values should be illustrated through the candidate experience you deliver.
2. Build confidence and be clear about the big picture. If the individual understands their role and how it contributes to the fulfilment of the organisation’s purpose and vision, this fosters a sense of loyalty and the ability to view the importance of their activity.
3. Encourage high performance and creativity. Great candidate experience needs to continue after a candidate has joined. Be organized – make sure the employee has all they need to start, but also push the boundaries: Can an online community be created to welcome the individual and provide collaboration?
4. Support diversity and inclusiveness. This can be as straightforward as matching diverse new hires with peer mentors from the same gender and/or ethnic background. The bottom line here is about encouraging individuals to be themselves, so train your people to be open to different perspectives and how these can add value and richness to business outcomes and working life.
5. Choose your partner wisely. The right partner can help you create a gold-class onboarding experience, and many of them will have already done much of the hard work for you. In a recent Cielo report,only 15% of organisations that utilised RPO had concerns around their onboarding process, indicating that utilising a supplier can help alleviate resource issues.
Providing a consistent, positive onboarding experience will improve retention and time-to-performance in new joiners. Onboarding should be as personal as possible, reinforcing employer brand letting you learn more about the employee. This is where experts like Cielo can help by building a coherent and proactive strategy.
