A scalable employee onboarding process is a must-have nowadays. As the workforce evolves to remote and hybrid working, onboarding your employees from different parts of the world needs more attention than it has before. Due to technology, having a great employee onboarding process is as equally important to have a scalable one.

Not only that, we know recruiting the best hires for your company is hard. How much more to retain these best hires?

One of the biggest challenges of HR managers is employee retention. "20% of new hires leave in the first 45 days of employment due to poor onboarding experience." And this all boils down to how you execute your employee onboarding process.

In this article, we'll talk about the benefits of a great employee onboarding process and how you can scale your process.

What is an Employee Onboarding

Employee Onboarding is not a one-time event, hence is a series of events or orientations where you inform and train your new hires about their role and responsibilities in the company. Consequently, it's the most critical part of hiring in-person, hybrid, and remote workers. Employee onboarding should be designed where your best hires can fully integrate seamlessly into your company or organization.

Just think about the phrase, “the first impression lasts”. It applies to great employee onboarding. You don't want your best hires to get lost in their first months on their roles and on how they can contribute to your company.

The Cons of Poor Employee Onboarding

So why should you give so much importance and readiness to your employee onboarding? What are the cons of poor employee onboarding?

Employee Retention Decreases

There is a high chance your employee retention decreases. And as a company, employee turnover would cost you a lot. New employees wouldn't want to stay in a company where they feel they aren't growing, they aren't given importance, and there's no relationship with HR or their leaders. Poor employee onboarding will cost you more than a good employee onboarding as your employee retention decreases. So it's time to build something that your new hires will love from the very start!

Negative Impression in your company

If you put yourself in the new hire's shoes--where you won't get a proper onboarding in your new job, you will think this company isn't serious at all in hiring and welcoming me into the company. You will feel lost with inadequate information, paperwork, and your role. You won't feel like giving your best shot to work in this company anymore.

If there are several new employees who will experience poor onboarding, it will have a huge negative impression on your company. You don't want that. Coz there's a high chance you won't get the best people to work for you.

How to build a Great & Scalable Employee Onboarding Process

As per study, "68% of employees believe their experience as a job candidate reflects how the company treats its people." Therefore, a great and scalable employee onboarding process doesn't only start when your candidate is hired. It even starts during the recruitment process.

Let's explore how you can improve and scale your recruitment process up to onboarding your employees.

During Recruitment

Unfortunately, HR managers mostly fail without realizing there's a thin line between recruitment and onboarding. Before applying for a job, the best candidates read and research your company. If you give them a poor first impression such as incomplete information, poor job interview, and poor communication, they will unlikely to stick around. They will look for another company that can give them much value.

Here are tips to improve your recruitment process:

• Provide a clear job description for every job opening you have. Give them a concrete list. You can be specific on the must-have & nice-to-have skills. This will avoid a mismatch of skills and expectations between the candidates and you.
• Be transparent in your recruitment timeline, schedule, and processes. By doing so, you're informing your applicants when and how you are conducting your recruitment.
• Communicate at every stage possible. Be straightforward on the status of each applicant. In this way, you're giving them a signal if they should stick with their application or not.
• Give them full information on how you will perform background and reference checks.
• Adding perks and benefits can also boost the excitement of the applicants to your job openings.

How you can scale this? HR managers use ATS or commonly known as Applicant Tracking System to scale their recruitment processes. You will have all your applicants' information in one place. You can share the status to your colleagues, team leaders, and executives.

The best tip for every recruitment and employee onboarding is to treat every applicant as a human. Building an authentic relationship with empathy can get you 5 stars in your recruitment process!

After Recruitment

Now that you have the list of the best candidates in your hand, it's time to send them a job offer and start the employee onboarding process!

Here are tips on how you can improve your after recruitment or employee onboarding. Right after the newly hire signed the contract, make sure you:

• Give them a warm welcome letter stating how thrilled you are to work with them.
• Share a start date and complete timeline of the employee onboarding process.
• Share all paperwork that they need to sign, fill out, and read.
• Give them full employee onboarding training to make sure you don't miss any information that they need to know.

How you can scale these?

1. Automate.

Automate the documents they need to sign and read such as contracts, code of conduct, company rules etc. HR managers use apps like hellosign.com and pandadoc.com

2. Create a SOP.

Both recruitment and onboarding are frequent tasks. Creating a SOP or a system for both can give you a huge effectiveness rate.

See: Standard Operating Procedure: What is an SOP? How To Write an SOP?

2. Use a learning platform for your training.

Today, learning platforms are not only used in online courses and classes. You can also use these platforms for a scalable employee onboarding process. With so much paperwork that needs to be done during the employee onboarding, creating a training course will help you to do this step by step, without forgetting important information that new hires should know during the onboarding.

The good thing is, that there are learning platforms that provide a customizable and comprehensive course template for scalable employee onboarding. Once you used Teachfloor, you can start using a free template with 14 lessons in a 25-day hybrid cohort-based course format.

Fortunately, you won't get lost as the template provides instructions on how you can use it and customize it according to your company's needs. We understand creating training for your employee onboarding is not a one-size-fits-all.

See: 20 Best Employee Training Templates for Your Next Training Programs

Sum Up

In conclusion, employee onboarding is the most critical stage of retaining your employees. Now that the workforce is developing into remote and hybrid workers, this is the best time to restructure your process and make it scalable. You don't want to lose your best hires just because of a poor onboarding process.

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