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Embracing Company Values from Day Zero: The Power of Pre-Boarding
Today, more than ever, hiring a new employee is a complex process that takes time and resources. Despite the best efforts of HR personnel, it is still often hit or miss. Matches between an employer and a new hire that seem perfect during interviews may prove futile within the first few months. Expectations turn out to be deceptive on both sides. This can result in a frustrated worker who leaves because they don’t fit or meet the requirements, loss of time for everyone, and even financial losses for the company. Fortunately, there is a way to minimize the chance of this happening and it’s pre-boarding.
According to available stats, world-class companies are likely to offer pre-boarding to their new hires by a staggering 53%. It is evident that successful integration of new employees into an organization begins long before they set foot in the office. In this article, let’s look at pre-boarding as a tool to promote corporate culture, ensure the best cultural fit between a company and an employee, and create a smooth and fulfilling integration experience for the new hire and the receiving team.
Understanding Pre-Boarding
Put simply, pre-boarding is the process of getting the future employee or even a prospective hire acquainted with the company. It entails information about the business, the mission and values of the company, some of its operational details and key people. It also gives a clear picture of what the job is about and what the person will do on a daily basis. It may seem futile when a company gives the candidate information, particularly someone who may not even be hired. What is the reasoning behind this? Is it truly necessary?
We at iSpring arrived at the need to implement pre-boarding practices a few years ago. One of the biggest reasons was an almost 30% turnover of our frontline staff during the trial period. While objectively, our onboarding process was strong and solid, we would still have to part ways with many new hires. There were two main reasons for this.
Firstly, new hires told us during their exit interviews that they felt overwhelmed and the job was not what they had expected. The second reason was cultural misalignment, which became evident only after some time. This problem cost us a lot of resources spent on salaries of people who would leave without having time to make any impact, our HR and and time resources. That is why we decided to implement pre-boarding.
When Do You Need Pre-boarding and What Benefits Does it Bring?
Truth to be told, not all businesses need pre-boarding and not all positions benefit from it. Here are a few criteria for situations when pre-boarding becomes an advantage.
1. You are in for a long haul
You are interested in hiring an employee for a long-term collaboration, with a clear development path for them to follow and grow into a professional with skills highly tailored for your business. In this case, pre-boarding allows you to create comfortable conditions for the individual to get to know your company values and to evaluate them against their own. You are giving them an opportunity to your potential future hire to weigh in a lot of factors and make an educated decision: are my personal values aligned with the company values?
Pre-boarding is great for myth-busting and addressing stereotypes about your brand and company that people from the outside might have. It’s also a good way to pass first-hand knowledge about your industry and work specifics to someone who has little experience with this. This information is invaluable for future hires if you want them to step into the new position with open eyes and full understanding of what it entails.
2. You want to identify a potential misalignment of values as early as possible
Ensuring that employees, management and stakeholders are on the same page value-wise is essential for business success. Value conflict is one of the most common reasons why employees and employers part ways. Cultural fit interviews alone may not be enough as they are focused more on identifying prospect hire values and beliefs from their words. Pre-boarding actually allows you to see them in action. It also gives the candidates a perfect opportunity to get to know your company values and mission in detail and to understand for themselves if they will fit in.
3. You need to understand your potential hire’s motivation
If you’re looking for a proactive self-starter, pre-boarding is a great way to assess these qualities. If you give materials to your candidate before the interview, a person with high motivation to get your job would find time to study them carefully, will have questions, and will demonstrate curiosity and interest.
4. You want to give your future worker some context about their position
Pre-boarding is a great way to smooth out the experience of diving into the new job head-first. The first few days or weeks can be overwhelming for a new hire, no matter how experienced they are. New hires still have to process a lot of info, understand a huge amount of intricate particularities that are specific for your company only. The more advanced the position, in fact, the more context they will need to grasp, quickly. Pre-boarding allows you to make the immersion process seamless. It is a great way to let your new employee experience the feeling of starting prepared. In our experience at iSpring, employees are very grateful for this. It drives and gives our new hires confidence.
5. You have some mandatory trainings that require completion
Once you have already made an offer and your future employee has accepted, there’s still usually a time gap before they actually start working. If you want to jump right to the important onboarding material, you can include certain training in pre-boarding. This pertains to various mandatory training materials such as safety, code of conduct, communication protocols, security and privacy rules, and legal information.
Situations When you Don’t Need Pre-boarding and Pre-boarding Caveats. What Are They?
It may sound like pre-boarding can solve quite a few hiring problems, but of course, there’s always a caveat, and there are situations when you will not benefit from pre-boarding or simply won’t need it. Let’s talk about those:
1. Pre-boarding makes your hiring process longer
It may be great when careful candidate selection is your top priority and you’re ready to take time to find the best match. However, if you just need to quickly close a gap, especially if the job is not highly skilled, pre-boarding will probably not be necessary. Especially if you have a wide choice of candidates.
2. Pre-boarding doesn’t suit all positions or even domains
Sure enough, in tech and IT, when you’re looking for narrow expertise and a long-term collaboration, pre-boarding is beneficial. However, in industries or positions where staff turnover is traditionally high or contracts are seasonal and short-term, complex pre-boarding will probably be a waste of resources and time.
3. It requires resources
Yes, there will be intense investments. You need to design and create pre-boarding materials, establish pre-boarding workflows and add extra responsibilities to the staff that will handle pre-boarding. This may take some time and even a few iterations before you arrive at a procedure and a set of materials that work best.
4. It may not always provide correct selection results
On the one hand, pre-boarding is a good way to evaluate your candidate’s motivation. On the other hand, this evaluation may not always be correct. Let’s take a look at the situation from the candidate’s point of view: a company provides you with a set of materials you need to go through, understand and probably memorize to a certain extent before the interview.
This means that aside from a very possible test assignment, they also need to invest extra time, maybe up to a few hours into this well. An otherwise perfect candidate may feel discouraged by these requirements. They may think that it’s not worth their while to invest the time so early into the selection process, especially when they don’t even know the outcome. They also may not find time for it for perfectly objective reasons, such as tight working schedules or family issues. So, there’s a fair chance that an extensive pre-offer pre-boarding may lose you some otherwise great candidates. One certain conclusion we arrived at is that over-reliance on pre-boarding may be deceptive and hiring still needs an individual approach.
Key Pre-boarding Elements
If you think of creating a pre-boarding program, here’s a checklist of potential pre-boarding materials. You can make them available to potential candidates before interviews as well as to new hires before they start working.
Welcome Message: A personal greeting from the CEO or team leader. It can actually make new employees feel valued and excited about their new role.
Company Culture Overview: Detailed information about the company’s mission, values, and culture helps you align new hires with the organizational ethics from the start.
Team Introductions: Providing information about team members and key contacts helps new hires know who they can go to and when. This will reduce first-day anxieties.
Role Clarification: Clearly outline what will be expected from the new employee, including job responsibilities and goals.
Administrative Details: Information on payroll, work schedules, and benefits is better communicated early to smooth out potential administrative issues.
Training Schedule: You can introduce training sessions or orientation that the employee will need to complete. Knowing how the first days will look helps immensely to feel more confident.
Logistics Information: Details about the workplace, such as dress code, parking, security procedures, and workstation setup.
Technology Setup: Instructions for setting up email accounts, accessing company networks, or any necessary software installations should be provided beforehand to ensure they are ready to start work immediately.
FAQs: A list of frequently asked questions can help address common concerns and reduce the number of basic and typical inquiries your HR will otherwise have to deal with.
Let’s Talk Results
Of course, the best way to understand how pre-boarding works is to see it in action. We implemented a pre-boarding system several years ago. We made a series of course materials using our own LMS, iSpring Learn. These materials include introductory videos by our CEO, initiation courses about eLearning in general and iSpring in particular. They allow our candidates to know what we value, what we expect, what we offer and what they will be doing in their positions. By now we have extensive data about the results of our pre-boarding program. Here are some facts and numbers we would like to share.
- Before pre-boarding, our new hire turnover was 28%. After pre-boarding, it’s 10%.
- Overall staff turnover was decreased by 25%
- We have significantly improved our hire funnel by proceeding with candidates who largely share our values and mindset
- We have decreased the time it takes for a new hire to start working on their first actual task from 1 month to 2 weeks
- We have significantly cut down the overall hiring costs
- We have increased the new hire satisfaction, as trial period passing questionnaires and staff feedback show
- We have practically eliminated value conflict as the reason for our staff leaving the company
Conclusion
Pre-boarding should definitely be viewed not just as a preparatory step, but as a strategic element of a hiring process. It allows you to create valuable rapport with the new hire early on. This process also allows both sides to estimate culture fit and value alignment. The tips described above can be used to make a well-informed decision and evaluate the benefits and challenges of introducing a pre-boarding program for your company.
