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.

In the last ten years, this online underdog has grown from a catch-all note-bin for scatterbrained journalists to a serious collaborative business tool. Evernote’s General Manager for Europe and the Middle East expounds.

Beat Buhlmann teaches at Harvard, holds the timely degree-designation of an E-Mba, and spends his days at Evernote thinking about digital transformation and online marketing. A far cry from a four-year apprenticeship as a small-town car mechanic. For more than 15 years, Beat has been dealing with virtual teams, in theory and practice, and has published two books along the way: “Need to Manage a Virtual Team? Theory and Practice in a Nutshell”, and “Become the CEO of Your Own Life”. Ahead of his speaking engagement at Hiring Success 18 Europe, we managed to catch this fast-moving polymath and get a pulse of what he’ll be discussing in Berlin this September

With your extensive IT background, what attracted you to Evernote?

For more than two decades, I have been fascinated by productivity, by how can I achieve my goals faster, more easily, spending less money, using less resources, or a combination of these things. Evernote was the ideal place to make my passion my job.

What have been the biggest challenges?

There was a time where Evernote did too many things, like selling office supplies, bags, and even Evernote socks (no joke). Since the new CEO, Chris O’Neill, took over, we refocused on our core business: making people more productive and helping them achieve their goals. Ten years of Evernote took not only talent, but persistence and grit – and these are the values we will keep with us as we move forward. Introducing Evernote Business in 2012 has been by far our biggest change – it was a great way for us to affirm that not only are we passionate about personal productivity, but our commitment to teams and the workplace.

Given the nature of the product, are people still hesitant to go fully digital, or have you stopped having to convince potential users Evernote is safe and reliable?

There will always be skeptics saying that going digital is risky, and actually, there is no such thing as 100 percent safety. We face risk every day in our lives, whether we’re on a plane or sitting at home. A lot of people don’t fully understand what cloud means, and therefore say no to cloud technology in a business context. That’s why we wrote a cloud whitepaper to help people understand that cloud is still the safest place for their data.

You’ve also written two books. What was the impetus for that? How was that process for you?

Passion. Pure passion about two key topics: managing remote teams (book 1: link), and how to combine business and private life in a meaningful way (book 2: link).

How much of a competitor to Evernote is something like Slack?

They are two very different tools in one ecosystem. You can clip Slack conversations into Evernote or share previews of notes within Slack. Many of our users love these integrations, because their favorite tools compliment each other, and this makes them more productive.  

How much has machine learning and AI become integrated into Evernote? Where do you see that technology talking this product in the coming years?

Research and development contribute hugely to Evernote’s popularity and usefulness. Many Evernote users had their first “Wow!” moment when they realized they could upload handwritten notes and search for them later. We’ve got many exciting plans for the future that will incorporate new technology to augment productivity power.