For many in HR, they might be focusing their employee experience efforts on the incumbent workforce. This makes sense. A great employee experience, as Red Branch Media recently concluded in an article on the topic, “is foundational to business performance... if you want to build your brand, foster innovation, and sustain engagement.” Two of these elements, brand and engagement especially, are increasingly wholly owned by the people function; driven by an awareness that if these elements are managed well they result in a measurable organisational performance uptick.

However, there needs to be serious questions asked about the experience of future talent, too – especially in the recruitment process and in onboarding. Recent Allied research found that for companies that focus on the experience of incoming hires it can help circumvent major pitfalls as well as creating benefits for both the business and those set to join. Yet, the current state of play for the general onboarding experience is not that great. Worryingly, companies lose 25% of all new employees within a year and, according to Gallup data, 88% of organisations don’t onboard well. In fact, SHRM data shows that companies on average only really focus on onboarding for a week or so.

How to get better at onboarding

Improving this integral part of the hiring process was what a recent, and timely, round table from HR Grapevine and Sterling focused on. Titled 'How to enable safer, multi-site, friction-free onboarding in Retail and Hospitality', the session focused on how to improve some of the more administrative but necessary parts of onboarding – Right to Work checks etc – as well looking at how using digital tools can improve the process, consolidating and streamlining a crucial element of hiring that can sometimes be cumbersome.

‘Mission critical’ process

A large part of the early discussion focused on why onboarding has become even more ‘mission critical’ in these difficult times, with retail and hospitality experience a less straightforward process than many other industries. Couple that with increasing demand from candidates of a seamless digital experience that begets a safe working environment and there’s a lot of pressure.

In fact, whilst the ‘safety’ element of onboarding might have previously been something that employers focused on to ‘cover their own backs’, that understanding is changing. It is now about doubling down on delivering a people-first onboarding process that enables candidates to feel they were joining a trusted environment, a key part of attracting that talent into work.