With recruitment taking up a significant portion of a HR budget, once you’ve found the ideal candidate and they’ve accepted your offered role, effective onboarding is an essential next step. In 2018, good onboarding ensures candidates are more prepared, make an impact quicker, and are far more likely to stay with your organisation past the first six months.

Onboarding is the first significant opportunity to engage with your new hire before they start working. Onboarding is your first significant opportunity to engage with your new hire before they start working. High levels of engagement will lead to long-term employment and advocacy, so you’ll want to maximise every opportunity to build a good relationship.

Starting a job in a new organisation can be daunting but there are easy steps you can take to prepare new starters. Helping them to familiarise themselves with their role, teams, the organisation’s overall goals and how their contribution will make a difference.

Below are our recommendations for successful onboarding…

Don’t let paperwork scupper the hire

The quicker you get the paperwork out of the way the better as it’s the least engaging, but essential, part of onboarding. If you don’t yet have digital capabilities, we strongly recommend you look into at least introducing electronic acceptance, for ease and speed.

Make it digital

Digital onboarding offers the best experience for new recruits, including:

  • Making them feel part of their team before they even start by allowing inductions and mentor set ups, so they already know people on their first day. If you employ a virtual team, this is even more crucial.
  • All legal aspects can be covered off quickly without reems of paperwork to get through, allowing all required documents to be signed and uploaded.
  • Preparing employees by providing details on dress codes, schedules, maps and so on.
  • Supplying all information that a handbook would but in an easily digestible fashion.

Get the basics in place

Most of us will have experienced starting a new job and finding out your new employer isn’t quite prepared for your arrival. Work through everything they need to have to perform their role. Key elements are likely to include making sure their desk is ready, equipment ordered, access to systems has been requested and information is available on essential processes.

Provide a schedule

It’s likely your new recruit will need to meet with various people and undertake training or inductions. If you can arrange all of this in advance and provide your employee with a plan it will make them feel valued, rather than them having to figure it out for themselves when they start. Technology enables you to set up workflows that automate the end to end process, including checklists and automating comms to IT for kit to be set up.  

Be social

You can set up digital introductions and open up the lines of communication with new colleagues in advance of the candidate’s start date, so they feel at home from day one.

There are numerous opportunities to encourage employees to bond and get to know each other. This could come in many forms such as going out for a team lunch, ordering in takeaway or arranging a barbecue every so often. These social gatherings are low cost, easy to organise and are beneficial for everyone.

Successful onboarding will mean your new employees are ready to work and have peace of mind before they set foot in the door. There shouldn’t be any hold ups as you’ve taken already built up a strong relationship with them at the individual, team and organisational level.