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. 

Many a year, I’ve spent too many hours that I’d care to share watching the NFL Draft. At times, it is both heartwarming and gut-wrenching; the stories of so many inspirational college athletes, usually narrated by ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi, are relayed within the broadcast that you find yourself rooting for each of them to get a chance to live out their professional dreams.

As an employee of SmartRecruiters, I now realize the true nature of the NFL Draft: it is the best public example we have in the United States of the talent acquisition process. NFL front office professionals —general managers, player personnel, scouts—are the equivalent of a company’s talent acquisition team and the NFL coaches operate as the proxy for hiring managers —the people who will develop and interact with the new players on a day-to-day basis. 

This year’s NFL Draft, due to the public health circumstances we are all confronting, makes it the greatest experiment in virtual recruiting, hiring and onboarding, from which all companies can learn to adapt and refocus their hiring process steps to excel at the new normal.

Virtual Recruiting Lessons From the 2020 NFL Draft for Your Company

While the NFL was able to host its central recruiting event of the year, the NFL Scouting Combine, in late February, the teams of the league were not able to attend the usual slate of pro days, whereby college athletes perform drills and participate in interviews at their alma mater. Therefore, the full breadth of assessments that NFL teams utilize to evaluate their new hires was abbreviated. 

The in-person assessments of the traditional recruiting schedule generally provided an opportunity for the talent acquisition professionals of NFL teams to find diamonds in the rough. For instance, maybe a player didn’t perform amazingly well during his collegiate career, but he scored off the charts in both the physical and mental tests during his pro day.

Therefore, in this year’s Draft, it begs the question as to whether teams will have to rely more on the traditional markers of future athletic success: a player’s college stats and physical measurements.

In addition, teams might rely more on recommendations and evaluations from former coaches and teammates of players than ever before, since teams cannot conduct the extensive in-person interviews they are accustomed to.

As a result, the NFL’s hiring teams might exercise more caution than ever before, preventing unheralded college players from getting their first professional opportunities. 

This possible phenomenon represents a cautionary tale for talent acquisition leaders across the country. Many of the tools recruiting professionals were utilizing to break down previous barriers to employment and finding talent in places that otherwise were overlooked, such as reverse recruiting events, have now been curtailed.

Additionally, budgets for many recruiting teams have been truncated, forcing even more difficult decisions about where to spend remaining recruitment investments. Nonetheless, I think this is the moment where a company can really fortify its true social mission and public purpose by continuing to find alternative, virtual methods to recruit from diversified talent pools. 

For example, over 26 million Americans have become unemployed in the past five weeks; both a sobering reality and nonetheless, an incredible opportunity to build a talent pool for new hires. If your company is still hiring, the talent community of possible candidates is arguably more plentiful now than it ever will be, so be bold and utilize all of the virtual resources at your disposal to take your previous in-person events and shift them into a virtual reality. 

The scenes we will see of draft picks shedding tears of joy and hugging their loved ones after being selected during the NFL Draft can also be a scene your company recreates by hiring talent that is currently on the employment sidelines. 

Virtual Hiring’s Impact on the Relationship Between TA & Hiring Managers

The virtual setting of this year’s draft highlights the importance of the relationship between a hiring manager and a talent acquisition leader. In the normal setup of a NFL Draft’s war room, a NFL’s team primary hiring manager, the head coach, is seated right next to the team’s head of talent acquisition, the general manager.

In-person, you are able to arrive at last-second decisions based on impromptu conversations and real-time developments. With the individualized war room setups in the home offices of the hiring and TA teams, the head coach and GM will need to be on the same page well before they make their selections.

This example presents many learning opportunities for hiring managers and talent acquisition leaders in the non-sporting world. The coffee machine chat when you have deliberations about an interview that just took place will not be occurring in the near term.

Therefore, you have to make sure you are properly documenting all of your recruiting recaps in interview feedback forms that might traditionally be reserved for in-person back-and-forths. 

In addition, while letters of recommendations and candidate assessments are always critical elements of an effective recruiting process, virtual recruiting, like the NFL Draft this year is revealing, makes these aspects even more valuable because you will need to rely more on non-subjective forms of candidate evaluation without the traditional face-to-face interview.

The traditional measuring sticks of resumes and cover letters will continue to play important roles, but if you want to continue to find the equivalent of the 6th round pick that nets your company’s next Tom Brady, you will need to broaden your virtual recruiting scope to include more data points that reveal a candidate’s potential. 

Once, you have hired your talent via a completely virtual process, the NFL Draft is also providing a clue as to how you can carry over culture building and onboarding practices in a virtual environment.

The NFL has sent the hats and jerseys of each team to all the players who will potentially be selected in the first round of the NFL Draft, continuing the tradition of a new draftee donning the swag of his soon-to-be employer.

During traditional recruitment and onboarding, many companies utilize their swag as offerings of commitment to new hires. If the resources are still available at your company, you should also continue to provide the company swag that employees can feel proud to wear or place on their laptops while working from home.

Final Thoughts

In summation, the NFL Draft this year will not only be an entertaining viewing experience for the casual observer, but it will also be an educational watch for recruiting professionals because NFL teams decided now is not the time to defer the dreams and talent development of young professionals.

Instead, they have lifted and shifted their entire recruiting and hiring approaches to virtual environments, set up “war room” offices in their home basements, and are declaring to the entire country the time is now to bring to life the professional aspirations of first-time job seekers.  

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