Get onboard | Why how you deliver the candidate-to-employee experience matters more than you think

In today’s tough labour market, getting your offer accepted by the preferred candidate is a cause for celebration. Except that many organisations are finding that the expected time-to-value from these hires is not being achieved, that they are quitting early, in some cases before they have even started.

Why is this? In many cases, particularly for those digital-native generations, it is down to the experience of the previously overlooked, but increasingly vital, onboarding process.

The onboarding process

The onboarding process, the experience of those first interactions and structured introduction that a new joiner has with your organisation, matters like never before. The days of having a new employee arrive at the office to find that there might, or very often might not, be a workspace and maybe even a computer assigned to them have long gone.

Complexity

Research suggests that the average newly hired employee is required to complete 54 different tasks and activities comprising a typical onboarding process¹. This includes a range of administrative tasks, documents to complete and training activities. Information requests of the new employee come from many different sources within the company, from payroll through IT as well as line and functional management. They also typically include a number of external third parties, often requiring personal data and include multiple types of media including digital input, written and printed documents and even photographs. So a lot of information, to a lot of different stakeholders, in many different forms.