Organizations put lots of time and resources into hiring the best talent. But they often fail to look past initial recruiting costs and consider what it takes to retain new employees during the initial onboarding and ramp-up period.
There’s the external cost to recruit candidates, but also the internal costs of training and onboarding to consider. New employees usually decide within 30 to 90 days whether a company is a good fit. Poor onboarding processes lead to a higher dropout rate, increasing the overall hiring cost.
Ineffective onboarding and training also extend the ramp-up time for new employees. No one expects a new hire is going to be highly productive right away; but the longer it takes to ramp up, the higher the cost.
By Improving your onboarding processes, your organization could reduce hiring costs while increasing employee productivity.
Streamlined, effective onboarding is especially important for companies that are constantly scaling their staff to meet changing customer needs, such as large contractors and consulting firms. When you need to quickly bring 20, 50 or 100 people on board for a new project, it’s critical that you have an efficient process that helps new employees understand your company, from its culture and policies to your approach to delivering your product and services.
Here are five common challenges organizations encounter with onboarding:
- Knowledge management: Whether your firm is young or well established, you’ve accumulated a lot of content, institutional knowledge and history, but it’s usually not documented in a central location for easy access. New employees may not have access to long email threads on specific projects, and don’t know where to look for certain documents. It’s critical that they have a mechanism for finding information and learning about the company, such as a well-designed corporate intranet.
- Managing expertise: When new employees get stuck, they need an easy way to locate the right person to help them. In that case, a list of names and job titles isn’t much use. A company directory that includes expertise and experience makes it much easier for new employees to access the right people, improving efficiency across the organization.
- Updating company policies and workflows: Every company has different ways of working, and many of these idiosyncrasies don’t make it into updated documentation. The people currently doing the job keep that information in their heads, making it harder to onboard new employees.
- Accessing previous conversations and company news: Most organizations fail to collect and retain conversations in a useful way. This information may not be critical, but using a community-based newsfeed or social networking tool helps new employees quickly get up to speed on what’s happened before.
- Providing essential tools: You need a clear process for ensuring employees receive tools they need to be successful, from IT resources and support to internal contacts, training materials and more. That includes provisioning email and network accounts and making sure they have a computer, but also providing a dedicated place where new employees go to learn about the organization and how to do their jobs.
A streamlined, effective onboarding process — in addition to a first rate HR Portal — is a great way to reduce your hiring costs and minimize attrition during the onboarding period.
The first step is for organizations and new employees to recognize that onboarding is more than just completing paperwork on the first day. Especially as more organizations hire remote workers, these onboarding processes should be as seamless as possible.
Learn more about the opportunity to improve employee onboarding: Read our new e-book, 7 Keys To Mastering The Digital Workplace.
Does your HR Portal need an upgrade? Contact a Portal Solutions digital workplace expert for a free consultation today!
