According to a recent Microsoft study, 41% of workers globally are considering leaving their current employer within the next year. It’s no surprise that 53% of employees in the same survey said they are now more likely to prioritize health and wellbeing over work compared to before the pandemic. With stats like these, HR teams can no longer afford to ignore the obvious: it’s high time to rethink the work environment. Employee onboarding is a critical and yet often neglected element in this process. 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for 3 or more years if they experience great onboarding. Yet, only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job at onboarding. Without a good onboarding program, companies risk delivering a bad experience that traps them in a cycle of churn. Let’s explore what good onboarding means and how you can set up a scalable onboarding program to drive talent retention. 

Prioritize purpose and relationships 

Your onboarding process is the first step towards building a meaningful relationship with your employees. It sets them up for success, so they can build a long-term career at your company, helping you combat churn. But ultimately, people don’t stick around because of what they do in their specific role. They stay because they feel motivated to contribute to the company’s purpose and because they like the organization’s culture.

As Simon Sinek would say, don’t just introduce your new hire to what they will do and who they will work with, start with why. Make sure you communicate their role’s contribution to your company’s overall purpose from day one. Create a bond by introducing them to your brand and vision. Organize a buddy program so they get an insider’s look into your company’s culture from the start. 

Provide structure while putting compliance on auto-pilot 

Onboarding new hires effectively also means ensuring due diligence. But focusing too much on this means you cannot put building meaningful relationships at the top of your agenda. Look for tools that help you save time by standardizing and streamlining compliance. To standardize compliance, use solutions that enable you to use e-signature to gather all compliance docs digitally. To streamline it, deliver tasks in traceable and timely workflows. 

New hires shouldn’t feel like they have an overwhelming list of compliance tasks to complete at once. Each item should be triggered at the right time. Typical forms like W4 and I-9 (for U.S. hires), direct deposit authorizations, data retention agreements and others should be digitally signed and collected through your onboarding solution with ease. 

Customize workflows for regional and role-based needs

Speaking of compliance, in today’s global work environment, you need an onboarding process that can be easily scaled and configured for different needs. Your onboarding solution should enable you to configure onboarding easily per location and per role using custom workflows. For example, it should allow you to educate new hires about their benefits depending on their country of residence, and collect region-specific or role-related compliance documents. Custom workflows are also handy to deliver great virtual onboarding. 

Optimize your remote onboarding experience

If your organization is embracing a hybrid or fully remote working model, you need to consider the needs of your remote new hires carefully. For example, studies show that new hires’ reliance on their managers for onboarding support increased by 20% compared to before the pandemic. People who are starting in a fully remote position may need extra attention. 

There’s a few things you can do to optimize your remote onboarding experience. First, make sure you provide your hybrid or remote work policies and guidelines for new hires. Second, foster multiple touchpoints to keep the relationship warm. For instance, you can create tasks for the hiring manager to check in with the new hire one week in, one month in and 90-days into the role. Third, define project milestones and remote review cycles for the new employee to help them stay on track and identify any potential risks. 

Leverage data from across the recruitment process to personalize onboarding

Often, HR teams are sitting on a treasure trove of data collected during the recruitment process but they fail to leverage it during onboarding because it may not be easily accessible in their systems. For instance, they may have identified that the candidate had some skills gaps that need to be addressed through training. A solution that is native to your ATS, or closely integrates with it, can help you collect all of this data in one place. This enables you to personalize the onboarding process accordingly for each new hire.  

Gather feedback

Last but not least, remember to gather feedback from your new hire and the hiring team to improve your onboarding process and overall talent acquisition strategy. At the bare minimum, you should send a net hiring survey at the end of the onboarding period. But you might also want to collect feedback at different stages of the onboarding process to better understand how you can improve. 

To drive retention, start with great onboarding

In the age of employee churn, you can no longer afford to deliver a poor onboarding experience. Put compliance tasks on auto-pilot so you can focus on building a great relationship with your new hire from the start. Customize your onboarding program for remote and local needs, as well as for each role. Use key insights at your fingertips to personalize the new hire’s experience and make sure you gather feedback to improve it. 

Check out our Onboarding Guide with more detailed tips to build a scalable onboarding program. 

Getting your new hires up to speed takes time, but without a positive onboarding experience, many employees lose interest. Here are five ways to keep up the momentum—and engagement—in those first few days.

So, you sent an offer letter, the candidate accepted, and now you’re ready to sit back and congratulate yourself for a job well done. Your bit isn’t over just yet. You’ve still got to onboard. For new hires, the first few days are hugely important to their future work performance, their job retention, and their overall satisfaction. Research conducted by IBM found that when employees have regrets about accepting a new job, they are three times as likely to leave. However, positive employee onboarding experiences can be a crucial first step for everyone you welcome into your organization.

But before you drop a payload of paperwork on your new hire all at once, here are five ways to maximize your onboarding, and keep new employees happy and excited about their career decision.

1. Start Onboarding Before Day One

This one sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many companies wait until the last minute—or the day of—to start onboarding a new hire. The fact is, the sooner you begin, the more up to speed your new employee will be before he or she starts. It’s important to consider your employer branding—if you’re giving new hires the silent treatment between the offer letter and their first day, you’re already sending them the wrong message. Personal touches like an email that walks them through their first day, a welcome pack with a personal note or card, or even a phone call from a manager, can help ease anxieties.

More pragmatically, the time before a new hire starts is prime to begin the dreaded paperwork process. No one wants to spend their first few hours, or days, sitting in HR working their way through a mountain of forms, so send them important documents such as employee handbooks, I-9s, payroll forms, and non-disclosure agreements beforehand. Even better, set up a portal that contains digital versions of important documents that employees can complete during downtime, or throughout the week, rather than in one long sitting.

2. Make the Process Cross-Departmental with Collaborative Onboarding

Pairing up your new hire with a seasoned employee to teach them the ropes is a tried-and-true method, but maybe it’s time to try a collaborative approach, which builds rapport with other teams much faster than one-on-one onboarding. It’s a challenge for any one department to know the answer to every question to arise during onboarding, so it makes sense to rely on each team for their area of expertise—HR knows compliance; management knows performance expectations; coworkers know the day-to-day, and IT knows how to get equipment up and running.

Social-media-manager app Buffer assigns every new employee three buddies during their onboarding—leader buddy, role buddy, and culture buddy—as a way to give “a variety of interactions within and outside of their core areas”. This allows them to see how their new role fits in with the larger company structure, and can lead the way to future collaborations between departments, especially if your new hire comes in with strong ideas for projects or improvement.

3. Arrange One-on-One Time with Direct Managers

According to a recent LinkedIn survey, which polled 14,000 global professionals about preferred onboarding techniques, 96 percent responded that spending one-to-one time with their direct manager is the most important aspect of their onboarding experience. Entry-level and veteran hires benefit from learning about their responsibilities and expectations, and it gives them an opportunity to lay a solid foundation for a key work relationship. Studies show that greater supervisor support in a new hire’s first 6–21 months result in greater job satisfaction, higher engagement, and quicker salary increase over time.

4. Set Expectations and Goals Early

Uncertainty about job expectations and performance goals is a new hire’s worst enemy, which is why steps like establishing a relationship between new employees and direct managers are crucial to a new employee’s success. According to LinkedIn’s survey, understanding performance goals was the second most important aspect of onboarding. Setting goals and communicating them at the outset allows new hires to evaluate their own progress during their first few months. A formal performance review will help keep new employees on target, and allow for any course correction early on.

It’s also important you listen to new hires’ understanding of the goals and expectations. Maintaining communication will encourage even the most timid of new hires to voice honest feedback about what is or isn’t working for them—and may point out problems in your organization you didn’t know were there. SHRM reports that 38 percent of employees felt that when leaders dismiss their ideas without entertaining them, they tend to lack initiative. Don’t underestimate or waste a fresh perspective by discouraging open communication and feedback.

5. Double-Down on Company Culture, Values, and Principles

Eighty-one percent of new hires fail due to a lack of cultural fit, so proactively broadcast your company’s culture by sharing content on the company’s social media channels, include new hires in meetings or events, or feature the company history in the employee welcome packet. Be sure that your company’s Employee Value Proposition, mission statement, and guiding principles are all aligned.

At Zappos, employees who complete the five-week course focused on the company’s culture and values are offered around $4,000 to quit if they feel like the culture is not the right fit for them. Why? The company knows that poor cultural fit will impact employee engagement and performance.

Turning new hires into lasting employees isn’t rocket science, but with a thoughtful approach to how you onboard, you can set up your organization—and your new coworkers—for both short- and long-term success

The Winner of Hiring Success 18 – Berlin Edition’s Recruiting Startup Awards drives engagement from hiring managers and new employees by meeting both at their individual points of need.

As Recruiting Startup Awards heat up for Hiring Success 19 – Americas with over 100 startups vying to be one of the top five who will be joining us in San Francisco February 26-27 to pitch it our in front of an expert panel of judges and one-thousand plus TA leaders (voting ends February 4, click here to pick your fav!), we talk to the latest winner about their product and vision.

Enboarder wowed judges last September with an intuitive onboarding platform that helps candidates hit the ground running, boosting retention rates for employers.

Onboarding is a major struggle for most organizations. In fact, according to a recent a recent SHRM study “half of all senior outside hires fail within 18 months in a new position and half of all hourly workers leave new jobs within the first 120 days.”

The reality is Hiring Managers are busy and most lack the HR training to orchestrate new hire engagement in a meaningful way. That’s where Enboarder comes in. The name itself is a portmanteau of “engaging” and “onboarding”, and the mission is pretty much as simple as that – make onboarding engaging for everyone, including hiring managers.

We turn to partner strategist for Enboarder, Chris Cherry to learn more about how it all works, and the Enboarder’s vision for the future of talent acquisition (TA).

Briefly, on the back of a cocktail napkin, how does your product work?

Enboarder is an experience-driven onboarding platform that guides new hires and their managers through the onboarding process. We enable HR to design beautiful, engaging digital content that delivers automatically along bespoke timelines, straight to mobile. New hire/managers choose their communication preference (text message, Email, Facebook, Slack or WhatsApp). Each message is sent with an embedded link, which opens in the device browser when clicked. No apps to download, no usernames or logins, and no training required

What does your product do that can’t be replicated?

Enboarder is built from the ground up to solve the onboarding challenge from an engagement and experience perspective. From our choice of communications channels, the way content is structured and delivered, to the interface of the platform, no other product so holistically delivers on employee engagement.

Enboarder is also the only onboarding solution that solves the engagement issue from the hiring manager’s perspective. Managers have a major influence on a hire’s experience at their new job, but they’re busy, and don’t usually have in-depth HR training. Enboarder provides manager coaching, nudges and reminders to help even the busiest of managers deliver engaging onboarding experiences for their new hires.

Why is your product a necessary tool for Recruiters?

The TA challenge does not end with the offer letter. Given the cost and effort associated with getting the right person through the door, it makes sense to take steps to ensure you then retain that talent. Enboarder is the bridge that ensures a successful recruitment process is followed up by an engaging onboarding experience, guiding both new hires and their managers through the process from offer acceptance to day one, probation, and beyond.

How does your product help make the hiring process as easy as possible?

There’s a few things, Enboarder…

• Enables recruiters to deliver an engaging new hire experience.
• Makes new hires feel valued, accepted for their individuality and welcomed to their new organization.
• Helps prevent issues such as no-shows, and reduce early stage attrition.
• Gathers feedback and prompts stakeholders to immediately address problem areas.
• Provides a consistent experience for all new hires and promotes positive engagement with their manager.
• Leverages advocacy from new hires to generate referrals and promote workplace reviews (e.g. via Glassdoor).

At what stage of growth are you, and where is that relative to how big you want to be?

Founded in 2015, we have powered more than 100 thousand onboarding experiences via our platform. Our team is growing, with offices in Sydney, London and Austin TX. We are focused on major growth over the coming year, including expanding our international presence.

What do you see as the future of TA and how do you fit into it?

The human factor will continue to be the key to success in TA. Strong employer branding will need to be backed by real relationships, connections, and employee engagement.
At the same time, smarter technology will play a key part in helping busy employees and employers build these meaningful connections while balancing the other tasks that need to be done.

Enboarder will continue to evolve and innovate this intersection of technology and human experience.

Twenty percent of turnover happens within the first 45 days, here’s how to get through this delicate period with optimum retention!

Bad hires are more than just a drain on company morale (which by the way is a big deal). Bad hires are estimated to cost several times that person’s first-year salary. In fact, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh was quoted as saying that his own bad hires had cost the company well over $100 million. In almost every industry, salaries and variable costs related to the workforce are, by far, the highest costs of doing business. Point blank, hiring the wrong person should be avoided at all costs. What happens, however, if the hiring decision process is being blamed for a poor or non-existent onboarding process when the problem lies with poor onboarding?

Why your poor onboarding process could be your company’s biggest threat:

Imagine the time, effort and money put into recruiting, interviewing, vetting and hiring the best candidate for your team only to have that investment squandered as they walk through your doors. This is an all-too-familiar tale in companies where onboarding is not done right or not done at all.

• Retention starts day one. The job market is competitive. Recruiting and retaining good employees is more important than ever. The September jobs reports that announced a decline in the unemployment rate by 0.2 percentage to 3.7 percent; the lowest seen in the U.S. in decades. Fewer job seekers are actively looking, and in certain fields like tech, finance and medical, these sought-after pros can pick and choose where they land.  
• Culture is contagious. Culture is a recruiting competitive-edge that wins top talent to your team. Lack of communication, poor training, and high turnover rates not only cost your business money, they negatively impact your culture.
• Your brand is on display. What happens inside your company, no longer stays inside your company. With online networking on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and other platforms, new candidates now have the ability to learn what truly happens in your organization. Make sure what they see is positive!

Four ways HR tech solves your onboarding conundrum:

So, if you recognize your human resources and onboarding weaknesses, you’ve made a great step toward identifying the problem. And, no need to panic, you’ve got a bevy of tech tools that you can easily tap into to help you get your onboarding up to snuff ASAP!

1. Reach remote teams. The number of remote workers in the U.S. workforce has been trending upward for the last ten years. While offering remote work options is a great recruiting tool, it can create some training and communication challenges. Technologies like enterprise chat and robust, cloud-based project management systems are readily available that allow new team members to stay connected, get face-to-face training (even if it’s screen-to-screen) and provide visibility to progress.
2. Dot Is and cross Ts. Compliance is an ever-evolving area of human resources. When hiring new employees, it’s important to comply with federal, state and local regulations and document that compliance. By using HR tech tools to digitize the entire paperwork process, you can protect your company from risks of non-compliance or poor record-keeping. And the new hires will love you for streamlining this not-very-exciting-but necessary part of the onboarding.
3. Communication flow demystified. Your current employees, as well as your new employee, need a constant flow of communication. In fact, a top complaint of unhappy employees is that their company did not let them know when things changed. Transparency, easily accessible communication, and consistency are the keys to keeping your workforce (both new and existing) feeling in-the-know.
4. Gain key insights. HR tech tools can also provide you with insight as to what’s working with your onboarding efforts and what’s not. Using qualitative tools (like creating confidential feedback channels) and quantitative tools such as performance metrics or training follow-up surveys.

Your company only gets one chance to make a first impression with your new hires. And up to 20 percent of turnover occurs within the first 45 days of employment. The good news is there are countless technology tools to help support and grow with the demands of your unique team.

If you want to predict the end for your employees, look no further than the start. A bumpy on-ramp into your organization could very well be steering many of them to the nearest exit.

It should come as no surprise to HR managers, but the first 18 months of employment — when turnover can reach as high as 50 percent — are pivotal in the employee-employer relationship. But according to a Gallup study, a meager 12 percent of employees “strongly agree” that their organization provides a sufficient onboarding training process.

Far too many HR departments risk an abbreviated tenure with new hires by neglecting this early stage. Given the costs of losing a team member — at least six to nine months of his or her salary — preventing employee turnover should be a top priority for every company.

The Untapped Power of Onboarding Software

Thankfully, many HR departments have the necessary tools right at their fingertips. Many of these teams have already implemented a learning management system (LMS) for staff training, but they might not understand some of the ancillary LMS benefits. What was once a tool solely for internal use can now be leveraged long before an interview.

The advantages of a learning management system can begin as early as the recruitment phase. One HR executive recently told me about a successful hire funneled directly from the company’s online recruitment program, which vets candidates with mini certification courses and games designed to test skills. This talent acquisition software enabled the company to build a robust profile of candidate data before the interview process, which ensured it was choosing from the best of the best.

Finding and Onboarding Top Talent With LMS Software

Taking your onboarding program online can yield similar results for your firm. Here are five benefits of recruiting and onboarding new employees using your learning management system:

1)

You can track recruits on a centralized platform. Without a central database enabling a rapid review of an array of applicants, a recruiting manager might have little time to assess résumés or set up interviews. Using online training platform software to aggregate all the pertinent information about your recruits can save precious time.

Once you have the data readily available, you can use it to quickly identify which candidates should stay in the running. The software enables you to find individuals who have the right degree or key qualifications much faster than thumbing through an unyielding mountain of résumés.

2)

You can fill in gaps using detailed reports. Onboarding software brings a host of analytics to your recruitment process. With detailed reports, charts, and graphs of assessment data, you can collect critical information to find the right talent to fit your gaps.

Companies like Johnson & Johnson are adeptly using these features to match recruits with departments. By analyzing the traits of its top employees, the pharmaceutical giant identifies criteria for its assessments and is able to screen out applicants who might be unlikely to succeed. Likewise, you can develop your own criteria for what helps someone thrive in customer service or sales and then structure your employee onboarding software accordingly.

3)

You can uncover hidden talents. As many recruiters and hiring managers have learned, it’s not uncommon for candidates to discover that they’re better suited for a different position during the interview process. Why not let your employee onboarding software accelerate this realization? You can use the system to help prospective hires identify their core talents and then see open positions that match their expertise.

By moving this critical discovery phase forward, you can save your organization a good deal of time and money. Instead of going through the painful exercise of re-recruiting after shifting someone toward another department, you can funnel new hires into the right role from the start.

4)

You can get face time with candidates. Most employee onboarding software has built-in support for video conferencing. Companies such as Unilever have scrapped résumés altogether in favor of a mixture of game-based assessments and automated video interviews.

Once again, software can save you and your department the effort of going through an in-person interview only to discover that your promising candidate is a poor communicator or a bad fit for your organization. Get that important face-to-face contact before an official interview by using technology to connect.

5)

You can customize your onboarding by pinpointing areas of improvement. Because you’ve already established a profile for new hires in your onboarding system through the recruiting process, you can transition seamlessly into training. Given that nearly 90 percent of new hires say they don’t enter a new job with all the knowledge they need, they will require help to bridge the gaps in their skills.

Regardless of any shortcomings that might have come to light during interviews, induction training for new employees coupled with specific online courses can quickly bring them up to speed. You’re thus able to dive right into on-the-job training, which more than 75 percent of new employees have identified as the most important part of onboarding.

***

While the benefits of onboarding new employees are well-established, relatively few companies think to put their learning management systems to work during these early stages. With a flexible LMS that supports gamification, video conferencing, applicant tracking, and advanced reporting features, you can employ this software to smooth the on-ramp and pave the way to success for your new hires.

A growing number of businesses see flexible work options as a solution to the tight talent economy, this is how recruiters need to adapt.  

From a recruiting perspective, remote hiring is both a challenge and an opportunity. The ability to source globally means a larger talent pool, yet the prospect of finding a team member who can work effectively away from the office is daunting. However, ready or not, the reality of remote work as a common option approaches steadily, with Upwork’s “Future of Work Report” predicting at least 38% of full-time employees will work remotely within the next decade.

Accessible internet and the rise of workflow applications have made remote working an increasingly feasible option for companies looking to save money and/or build a global team. In spite of these positives, the challenge is clear: find a new worker who will be engaged, despite the distance… as employee engagement is a top concern, even with on-site staff.  

However, the success or failure of a remote work program has more to do with the company than the candidate. Assess an applicant all day, but if an organization doesn’t have effective communication or onboarding, the likelihood of growing a motivated remote team is slim to none.

Managing remote teams comes with a unique set of dynamics that can be quite different from managing in-house teams. Therefore, the processes for recruiting, onboarding and managing these teams must be designed to account for the distinct characteristics of the practice. As remote hiring becomes an important part of a company’s talent acquisition policy, businesses need to learn how to balance the potential downside of this approach with its obvious benefits.

Start Slow…

Working from home (WFH) gets a bad rap as another term for slacking off. Though studies have found that this isn’t the case at all, workers tend to be just as productive if not more so during home office days.

If your team is feeling nervous about the potential for lost productivity due to a remote team member, then start slow and build trust. Hire a candidate (or a few) on a freelance basis, and then offer a full-time position once the company knows they’ve found a new employee on which they can rely.

Process makes perfect…

Hiring remote workers often make companies examine the efficacy of their own processes. It’s easy to work around an ineffectual system when you can go down that hall and ask a coworker to help, but clunky technology or a bunk order-of-operations quickly becomes an impasse when a person works independently off-campus.

A quick list of questions to ask yourself…

• Is there a way to access team/company/HR resources online?
• Does the organization have an effective chat mechanism and a shared calendar?
• How will the candidate receive a virtual tour of the business?

Great expectations are great!…

Make expectations clear. Work assignments and project deadlines are a given, but also ask… are there certain hours staff should be online?… Or do you want video, not just sound, turned on during conferences? Take some time to think of the online-decorum the team expects, and codify it in an online resource.

Points you may include:

• Where/how to praise other team members
• Where/how to communicate negative feedback
• What is considered a “timely” response

Benefits benefit everyone…

Most offices offer benefits or perks for in-house workers that just make the day a little better. Things like free coffee or fresh fruit go a long way to show employees they are appreciated. Just because workers are remote, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get any fun stuff. Great benefits also help recruiters build a strong employee value proposition to attract top talent! 

Consider monthly stipends for music or video streaming services. Health insurance can be hard to navigate if you have a global team, so a monthly wellness stipend could be another option.

***

 At the end of the day, it’s important to remember communication and training will always be a challenge for businesses, and neither must be perfect in order to begin remote working recruiting efforts. Rather, use this list to identify problem areas so both hiring managers and candidates can navigate them together, and begin laying down solutions that make sense for all employees.

Employee onboarding has come a long way from watching DVDs in the company break room. Here are five ways to use learning management systems to provide a more positive, engaging, and fun experience for recent hires. 

New hire onboarding is a make-or-break moment in the employment cycle. This process helps employees develop their first impressions of their new workplace, their resources, and even their advancement opportunities.

And if it seems like their needs will not be met, they have no problem leaving. In fact, 17 percent of new hires quit within their first three months on the job. Considering the importance of successful new hire orientation, it’s surprising that only 32.6 percent of US employees say they are satisfied with their employers’ training programs.

The solution is pretty obvious: We need to find ways to improve our onboarding eLearning. An onboarding learning management system brings new employees up to speed while immersing them in your corporate culture. An LMS can handle the heavy lifting of orientation because it’s easier to deploy—it can also simplify employee development and monitoring.

These platforms enable companies to stay ahead of the competition and retain top talent. More importantly, new hires develop skills and fill gaps on their own terms, improving their satisfaction and productivity.

Good Training Gets Better

A well-built LMS definitely makes an impression with new hires. One HR manager I worked closely with heard rave reviews regarding her company’s LMS from a new hire. This new team member praised the system’s personalized resources and accessibility, noting it was a far cry from DVDs in the break room.

This speaks volumes about the role that an LMS can play in online onboarding. And the process only gets better when you enhance it with a gamified learning platform. Learning management system gamification provides training that truly motivates employees to keep going. It can transform otherwise boring company policy and compliance protocols into an engaging experience.

Additionally, game-based learning allows employees to gather the skills and knowledge they need to complete job-related tasks while having some fun along the way. They might be so eager to earn the next badge in their virtual display case that they actually go out of their way to learn more about a subject relevant to their job.

Not only is gamified learning more appealing, but it also makes it a breeze to track individual performance and participation. This real-time tracking enables managers to easily identify employees’ strengths and opportunities for growth, which makes annual reviews a more productive conversation. In short, new team members gain more knowledge during online onboarding, and your organization gets better production from its fresh talent.

5 Keys to Successfully Gamify Onboarding

Given the numerous benefits, a gamified learning platform seems like a smart move for companies in any industry. But before you pull the trigger and launch your new platform, follow these five LMS best practices to get the most bang for your buck:

1. Focus on behaviors and practical benefits. New hires are at a crucial stage of the employment cycle, so LMS games should guide learners to the information they need while reinforcing favorable behaviors. New employees should only advance to the next level after they have shown they have the necessary skills. Meanwhile, your game strategy and eLearning course design should demonstrate how learners can translate talents and knowledge gained from online training into the workplace.

2. Choose the right rewards for each task. Your onboarding game mechanics and rewards must suit employee preferences and needs, but they should also address your objectives and desired outcomes. For instance, badges are best for more involved accomplishments or working toward long-term goals. Alternatively, leaderboards tap into our competitive nature and fuel social interactivity. Use each feature accordingly. Consider how companies like Spotify and LivingSocial used constant performance feedback to entice 90 percent of employees to embrace a gamified review process.

3. Tap into intrinsic motivation. The goal of LMS gamification is to encourage the professional growth of your team members. A desire for public recognition might get employees engaged initially, but intrinsic motivation will keep them going. When employees notice that your gamified courses are improving their skills, it increases their confidence and their investment in your eLearning program. For example, LiveOps saw 23 percent better performance from employees who used its training app, which garnered 80 percent participation.

4. Keep competition light and productive. Competition can be a great motivator, but things quickly go downhill if it creates a hostile environment. New employees already feel apprehensive during their first days on the job, so keep the competition friendly and focused. In fact, your game narrative should support your company’s goals and help each employee see his or her role in the bigger picture. This makes the competition and your onboarding process more productive; team members experience a supportive community instead of feeling pitted against their peers.

5. Set clear ground rules. Be as clear as possible about your expectations. Let new hires know how they can earn points or badges, as well as what’s in it for them. Do they get a ticket to an exclusive training webinar? Do they unlock an online resource library? Be sure to emphasize intrinsic motivators: Explain how earning a sales skills badge demonstrates their mastery of the fine art of persuasion. Get early buy-in with your gamified online training program to ensure sustained employee participation.

Make no mistake: Using gamification for new employee training requires a robust LMS. It should have a strong focus on social learning and reporting. Most importantly, it should support your unique goals. Determine your desired outcomes ahead of time, and use that insight to find a gamified learning platform that keeps employees engaged and fosters professional growth.

Recruiters are taking a hint from the “promposal” trend and finding fun new ways to offer candidates a spot on the team.

“Promposals” started blowing up Instagram a little over two years ago, with American teens finding ever more creative ways to ask their peers to the final dance of Senior year. One high schooler covered their classmate’s car in Post-its spelling out “PROM?”, while another created a faux Hogwarts acceptance letter. There are a million beyond-cute examples, but they all have one thing in common: they demonstrate caring.

View this post on Instagram

 

Creative!

A post shared by Prom, Hoco, Sadies, & more! (@the.promposals) on Feb 8, 2017 at 4:42pm PST

Think about it, these eccentric invites are actually really brave. Imagine, these high schoolers are risking rejection and public humiliation at a time in their lives where social judgment is swift and often cruel. Yet these teens set aside those fears, and craft shared interests and inside jokes into a special experience for another person. So, if high schoolers can put themselves out there like that, maybe employers can too?  

In the realm of recruiting, which is all too often impersonal and transactional, here’s some companies who have injected their hiring process with a little bit of youthful exuberance to make the process more meaningful for everyone!

Make a Playlist: Sending a job offer in the form of a playlist, just made sense for Spotify. This personalized listening experience got the candidate stoked on the product and showcased the team’s personality. The music streaming app, hit the quirk on the head with this one because the zany mode of communication makes sense in the context of their product!

Take a close look at this lineup and one sees a broad variety of music genres, but check out the titles to get a load of the main message – they need this candidate, and they’re not afraid to say it!

Get it on the Gram: Tech marketing company HelloWorld put it all on the line by asking a former intern, Samantha Bankey to join the team as a full-time employee via Instagram. As a platform that’s all about making one-on-one connections via marketing, HelloWorld was practicing what they preach by sending the job offer via Bankey’s preferred mode of communication, social media.

The post started on Instagram, but the image of two smiling employees holding a sign asking Bankey to join the team was soon shared to Twitter and Facebook before going semi-viral. Bankey told Mashable of the experience, “When I was tagged in the Instagram post, I first thought, ‘Why would they possibly tag me in something?’ Once I saw what it was, I was in total disbelief. I jumped around and my dogs looked at me in horror like somebody was breaking in or something. I was just so excited.”

Desk Service: With every new hire the financial services firm, The Motley Fool sends new “fools” questionnaires to learn more about their recent recruits, and to make sure that these fresh faces find a totally personalized desk space waiting for them on their first day –  complete with welcome note, swag, posters, and favorite candy.

So what is the key to a perfect “jobposal”? It’s all about personalization: consider the candidate and what would make them feel welcome and excited to join the team. The frills are fun, but even a personal phone call from the hiring manager lets the candidate know the company cares about hiring them specifically. To plan something a little more grandiose, make sure the trappings say something about the actual work experience or the person you are bringing on.

Most importantly, remember that this is good news, awesome news, so enjoy being the bearer!