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An effective onboarding strategy is key to giving your new hires the best possible start.
Unfortunately, onboarding is often given low priority or partially neglected during the hiring process. However, merging your hiring and onboarding processes can lead to a more seamless transition that adequately sets new hires up for success and boosts your long-term retention rates.
Successful onboarding strategies go beyond the first few weeks of hiring a new employee. It is a continuous process focused on ensuring the recruit knows the ins and outs of your company and their role within it.
Having a seamless onboarding strategy in place cannot be overemphasized. It aids your new employees in reaching their full potential faster, contributing to the organization's advancement and growth.
In this post, let’s explore what an employee onboarding strategy is, why it’s important, the links between recruitment and onboarding, and, lastly, how to implement effective onboarding strategies.
What's an onboarding strategy?
An onboarding strategy is a long-term plan that aims to ensure a new employee transitions smoothly into the company. It encompasses all the activities from orientation to various training and other developmental activities that ensure the new hire gets accustomed to the company's culture.
A new hire onboarding strategy should achieve the following:
- Integrate new employees with the company's culture and standards.
- Increase the chances of the recruits being successful on the job.
- Support new employees in reaching set onboarding goals.
- Help them establish a good rapport with their colleagues.
- Help them clearly understand their job roles and expectations.
- Teach the new employee how to successfully handle their task with little or no supervision.
- Boost the trust and confidence of the new employee.
- Provide them with all the necessary information, support, and knowledge for their career development.
Why is it important to have an onboarding strategy?
According to a survey carried out by BambooHR, it was revealed that 80% of new employees who experienced an effective onboarding process hold their company in high esteem.
“I truly believe that onboarding is an art. Each new employee brings with them the potential to achieve and succeed. To lose the energy of a new hire through poor onboarding is an opportunity lost.” — Sarah Wetzel, Director of Human Resources at engage:BDR.
For example, research shows that 46% of new hires fail within their first 18 months. While many factors may contribute to this, better hiring and onboarding practices play a huge role in speeding up the integration of new hires with team processes, standards, and culture — hence, increasing their chances of success on the job.
Let's dive into some of the importance of an onboarding strategy.
Creates positive first impressions
An effective onboarding strategy not only creates a positive first impression of the company but also creates a positive effect on your company’s employer brand. New hires are likely to share their experience with their friends, family, former coworkers, etc. which can affect how your company is seen by prospective employees and even customers.
Neglecting your employee onboarding strategy can unintentionally make new hires feel unwelcome and unvalued—and they’ll tell others to stay away. Make sure your onboarding strategies cater to a positive employee experience and leave a lasting, positive impression.
Helps new hires settle down in their jobs
When planning how to help new employees settle in, strategic onboarding helps them get familiar with how your company operates. They can learn about the different departments and how their role fits into the grand scheme of things.
This way, new hires integrate smoothly and get up to speed with their work much faster. This helps them to become more productive and have fewer frustrations in the workplace.
Saves turnover expenses
The average financial cost of replacing an employee can cost one-half or twice the initial annual paycheck. An effective onboarding process can help reduce turnover and save a company from that unnecessary expense.
Strategic employee onboarding isn’t something to have just to tick a box, it’s an investment that pays for itself by reducing the financial impact of staff turnover, among other things.
Retains new employees
Any onboarding strategy used by the hiring team will determine if the new employees will stay or not. In fact, employees that go through an effective onboarding process are 2.6 times more likely to stay committed to their employers.
When employees feel connected to the company at an early stage, they’re more motivated to do their best work and are less likely to quit prematurely or without notice.
Increases employee engagement
A positive, strategic onboarding process not only motivates employees to do their jobs better, but also encourages them to be creative while they’re at it.
A study shows 83% of employers say good recruitment and onboarding practices are essential to engage their workforce. Another study shows 54% of companies with good onboarding enjoy higher employee engagement rates. Remember, employee engagement starts from the hiring and onboarding process.
7 onboarding strategies you should include in your hiring process
You can't build a solid building on a weak foundation. Onboarding is a journey and part of your new hire's employee experience, determining how they’ll do their job and interact with your company.
With this in mind, let’s look at 7 onboarding strategies that should be included in your hiring process.
1. Use pre-boarding to create a great first impression
All HR professionals have experienced this either directly or indirectly: a candidate has signed the offer letter and the hiring manager is eagerly awaiting the start date only for the candidate to withdraw at the last minute. Starting the onboarding process early helps that candidate engage with the company right away, feel welcome and valued, and alleviate any of their lingering doubts.
Here are a pre-boarding and onboarding strategy examples:
- Welcome emails: Starting off with a warm welcome is a great way to set the tone of the new hire’s time at your company. An email or a series of emails may include a message from the CEO, team introductions, company history, or information on clubs or committees. This helps new employees enter their role understanding the company better and feeling valued.
- Pre-boarding portal access: Getting your new hires into your HR portal to read policies and sign documents in bite-size chunks over the days before their start date saves them from feeling overwhelmed by paperwork on day one.
- Introduction calls: While these don’t necessarily need to happen before the start date, giving new hires a heads up of who they’ll be talking to and when allows them to prepare for meeting the key players in your organization.
- Assign a buddy: Starting a new job and not knowing anyone can be scary. Give your new hire a buddy to help them through. Before their start date, have the buddy reach out to your new hire and start building that relationship early.
- Swag: Sending a new hire a welcome package with company-branded merchandise, little gadgets for their desks, and a personalized note demonstrates thoughtfulness and makes them feel less like a number and more like a valued addition to the team.
Starting the onboarding process early also helps prepare new hires to hit the ground running once their start date hits, preventing any culture shock and getting them excited about their new role.
2. Incorporate learning & development (L&D) into the onboarding experience
Ideally, you want your new hires to be ready to take on their role’s responsibilities from day one, but you don’t want to risk them feeling overwhelmed and underprepared. According to Gallup, only 29% of new hires say they feel fully prepared and supported to excel in their role even after their onboarding experience.
So, make learning a part of their onboarding goals. Rather than just familiarizing your new hire with the company and the people, get them started on role-specific learning such as processes, software, and how their role works together with others.
Good learning tools to include are:
- Software tutorials
- Videos on company values & procedures
- Brief one-on-one sessions with a manager
3. Use mentorship programs
According to a Sage report, 93% of small/medium-sized businesses believe mentorship programs will help them succeed, but only 28% of those businesses use a mentorship program. So get ahead of the competition by using mentorship programs to increase retention rates, boost employee performance, and make employees feel like they belong.
There are a few different ways to structure a mentorship program to suit recruitment and onboarding and beyond. A peer mentor program or group mentoring may be the best fit for onboarding, but consider different mentorship program ideas to reach your desired outcome.
The goal of your mentorship program will influence the next step: mentor matching.
Pairing your recruit with the right mentor is crucial. The mentor needs to have the right skills and experience, and a compatible communication style (and shared interests, if possible). Tools like Together's mentor matching software helps you choose matching criteria then automates pairing your new hire with a suitable mentor.
Periodically check in with your new hire and their mentor either directly or by requesting feedback through your mentor tools to make sure both parties are enjoying and finding value in the pairing.
4. Explore the employee journey
Onboarding sets the tone of the relationship between the new hire and your company. Part of your employee onboarding strategy should be making sure the new hire understands the touchpoints of their journey—beyond onboarding and into their career trajectory with the company.
Employees—especially the younger generations—are hungrier than ever to learn, grow, and advance. Laying out some of the opportunities for professional development in your hiring and onboarding process can have new hires looking ahead to their long term career goals and where they see themselves at your company in the future.
5. Help new hires appreciate and understand the company culture
Every company has its own mix of cultural elements that make it a unique place to work.
Part of your employee onboarding strategy should be helping your new hires understand the intricacies of your company culture, helping them transition into this new dynamic more smoothly. Rather than only focusing on the job descriptions, expectations, and roles, allow new hires to explore committees or special interest groups, have them share a picture of their cat or dog on the Slack #pets channel, and invite them to cultural events to make them feel part of the team.
6. Create a collection of new hire resources
Between all the paperwork, meeting new people, and getting used to new responsibilities, starting a new job can be overwhelming. Equipping new employees with resources that contain basic information, workflows, materials, and resources all in one place makes it far less stressful.
Creating a collection of helpful resources will come in handy when employees get stuck with tasks. They may be hesitant to reach out to colleagues or their manager to address the challenge, so providing a repository of information (such as internal web pages, guidebooks, or a tutorial video library) where they can look for their own answers first keeps them moving.
7. Use technology to streamline the onboarding process
An organized, intuitive process makes starting a new job feel a lot less overwhelming and makes managing the onboarding program less of a burden on administrators.
Using the right technology can make your onboarding process a breeze for all involved. Development programs software allows you to gather all the communications, learning resources, mentoring programs, tasks, and more all in one platform that integrates with your LMS and HRIS. This prevents both new hires and administrators from hopping from system to system to complete their tasks.
The four elements of an effective onboarding strategy
The success or failure of an onboarding process depends on how you approach and sustain it.
Here are the four elements you need to craft effective onboarding strategies:
Onboarding goals
An onboarding strategy without clear-cut goals in mind is likely to fail before it even starts.
The hiring team should state what they intend to achieve in their onboarding process for all new hires. (tip: set your SMART goals)
Here are a few examples of onboarding goals to get you started:
- Increase new hire retention rates by X%
- Get X% favorable feedback on onboarding
- See an increase of X% engagement with onboarding resources
Access
In a digital workplace, making sure new hires have access to tools, resources, and support can be tricky. As part of the onboarding process, create a checklist to get your new hire into the right systems, understanding expectations of the process, and who and where to go to for help. This makes for a much smoother onboarding.
Relationships
Relationship is one of the core elements of successful onboarding strategies. Relationships built in the first few months can last long into their career at your company and beyond. Focusing on facilitating these relationships early on helps your new hires feel like they belong and are valued.
Encourage them to cultivate and build internal connections by introducing them to departments, key stakeholders, and managers.
Context
Giving your new hires context is key. This means providing them with the necessary background information to understand and do their job like policies and procedures, role-specific expectations, and company resource libraries.
See your onboarding strategies come to life
Onboarding is arguably one of the most important activities at your company. It sets the tone of how your employees engage and perform from day one—or whether they want to stay at all. Creating onboarding strategies that are sustainable and scalable makes sure you reap the benefits.
Together’s development programs software helps you do just that. By gathering all of your onboarding processes, communications, and resources in one place, it makes it far less cumbersome and overwhelming for your new hire to engage while making it easier for you to manage the program.
Learn more how our development program software can help you and chat with our experts—book a demo today!
