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.

Typically thrust upon HR departments with instructions to meet quotas and boost statistics, the untold truth about diversity hires is that many don’t stick around, and it’s for lack of true inclusion.

If there’s any truth to hiring managers favoring candidates culturally similar to themselves, how then, is the white male-dominated tech industry expected to more accurately reflect the spectral nature of our population? According to Bärí Williams, VP of Legal, Policy & Business Affairs at All Turtles and former Head of North American business operations for StubHub, it begins by asking the simple question: “How can we do better?”

In 1960s America, models for business diversity stemmed from affirmative action and equal employment opportunity compliances, which all too often looked more like tokenism. In a relatively more enlightened 2018, businesses are taking on the challenge to undo this mindset. LinkedIn’s 2018 Global Recruiting Trends study shows a greater focus on making diversity stick than previous years, with 78% of companies prioritizing diversity to improve work culture, and 62% to boost financial performance.

As the next wave of business leaders emerge, Williams, an Oakland native with a career centered around the Bay Area, believes we are moving closer to more inclusive company cultures, because society is, despite certain trends to the contrary, moving towards inclusivity. “It’s interesting watching how differently my eight-year-old sees the world,” she says. “The only president he’s ever known is a black man, and then one candidate running after him is a woman.”

However much American politics appeared to be progressing, the results of the last presidential election are a stark reminder of how complacency can quickly unravel years of progress, and for Williams, avoiding complacency is paramount. “It’s great that diversity doesn’t feel like an anomaly to my son, and it shouldn’t, but you also have to work hard to ensure that it’s not.”

While working at Facebook, before StubHub, Williams noticed how all of the company’s business partners — consultants, service providers, hardware, and infrastructure suppliers — reflected the majority company makeup. So she set out to diversify Facebook’s business operations.

She launched the social media giant’s supplier diversity program, building relationships with minority-owned businesses that facilitated the company’s business operations. This ranged from producing branded Facebook swag like hoodies, stickers and pens, to catering, staffing and photography services for company events. As a result, Facebook made itself more accessible to these communities, while providing new economic opportunities and demonstrating a commitment to improving their quality of life.

For Williams, building an inclusive culture that’s “woven into the fabric of the company” is key to achieving true diversity and inclusion. This means not only hiring racially and gender diverse talent, but finding “non-traditional ways to reach your benchmarks for diversity,” through untapped channels, in order to identify non-obvious candidates.

And while the Global Recruiting Trends report shows that more tech companies are already approaching the question of “How can we do better?”, 38% of companies surveyed struggle to find diverse candidates to interview.

For Williams, the reason is clear: many tech companies do not contain diverse populations, creating a vacuum for companies desperate to source diverse candidates, and with a lack of diverse candidates in surrounding communities, it’s no wonder why tech companies struggle to source, hire, and retain non-white male talent.

A solution is for companies to explore other channels. “Maybe it’s more remote work, or flex schedules,” says Williams, “or allowing people to commute back and forth between certain cities. Diverse populations don’t want to live in cities that feel inhospitable, don’t have amenities they want, or don’t give them a sense of community.”

And the problem isn’t simply sourcing diverse candidates. Fourteen percent of companies surveyed by LinkedIn struggle to get diverse candidates through the interview process, and 8% struggle with getting diverse candidates to accept offers.

But there has been progress. Recruiting software startup Lever manages an even 50:50 male to female workforce, excludes photos from applications and uses inclusive job descriptions, and promotes support groups for women and LGBTQ employees. SmartRecruiters launched the industry’s first AI-powered recruiting assistant, solving the problem of identifying great talent, on any ATS, without selection bias. Internet radio company Pandora offers bias and assumption training to promote a positive workplace environment, eliminated “cultural fit” from job applications, and host happy-hour fundraisers for black history month and female leadership to align the events with company values.

Williams urges hiring managers and recruiters to judge non-traditional candidates through a different lens. “Value that candidate’s unique experiences and perspectives,” she says. “Judge them holistically and allow them to authentically be themselves.” According to Williams, these practices make employees feel valued and give them a sense of belonging.

“Everyone has had an instance in life where they have been excluded from something,” says Williams, explaining how inclusion is an easier concept for people to grasp than diversity. Channeling that feeling of isolation or exclusion can motivate someone to ask, “What can I do to make this person’s life a little easier today, or, what can I do to bring in a second or a third person?”

Promoting diversity and inclusion should not an objective for HR departments but a company-wide goal, where all employees must echo the question ‘How can we do better?’

“More than being mentors, it’s about being sponsors,” says Williams. “Mentors will give you guidance once you’re in the room, but sponsors will advocate for you when you’re not.

“Diversity gets people in the door,” she says, “inclusion keeps them there.”

When the European Union’s new data privacy rules are implemented on May 25th, the way the web is regulated will change forever, and it’s not just a legal issue. After the lawyers, product designers are next in the compliance hot-seat.

You’re no dummy. You’ve known for a while now the European Union’s General Data Privacy Regulation becomes enforceable on May 25th. You know that whether based in Europe or not, if you do business with an EU company or have even one European citizen on your payroll, you’ve had to rejig how you store personal data, either compiled internally on your servers, or gathered from your company’s website, be it from customers, new-hire candidates, or employees. You’ve consulted your legal department and even retained outside counsel to assure that when the clock strikes midnight on May 24th – in GMT+1, of course – none of your company departments will be left hanging in the breeze.

So where do you start when compliance means working backwards?

And since you’ve got that sorted, the next step is to examine how GDPR compliance will affect your product design, because chances are you have a website, and we’ll lay down cash money it wasn’t designed with GDPR in mind. So where do you start when compliance means working backwards?

The keywords here are Explicit Consent, and there are a few steps you need to follow.

The first thing to consider is permission. While we’ve grown accustomed to Silicon Valley software asking to access our smartphone cameras, photos and address books – and for the most part, forking over this intellectual-property gold without a second thought – GDPR demands that for you, digital business master, when an individual uses your website, they are provided clear notice that their data is being gathered, and given the choice whether, or for how long, you can store their data – anything from an email or a phone number to more complex information you could feasibly sell to other parties. The keywords here are Explicit Consent, and there are a few steps you need to follow.

Request Permission

By now we are used to clicking away the cookies permission box like a fly at a picnic, so your first line of site adjustment can be as easy as altering your cookies pop-up to include a permissions box to store visitor/customer data. In GDPR terms, this is an active opt-in, and in addition to this, visitors must be informed, in the sense that if you’re redesigning your pop-ups, you must make it clear that personal information may be shared, for either commercial or analytical purposes, and provide a clear choice to opt-in, or not.

Unbundle Your Presentation

The presentation of these terms and conditions must also be unbundled, which means personal data information must be presented outside the usual terms and conditions you may already have in place, and the methods and third parties of how the information will be shared must be named. If a user consents to have their data shared and, say, in a few minutes, days, weeks or months changes their mind, it must be easy to withdraw from data sharing.

Create a Framework

If, by chance, you’re a new business building your website, you have the advantage of being able to take GDPR into account from the ground up, and you’ll be pleased to discover there’s been a privacy framework kicking around since the nineties, called Privacy by Design, though its true urgency is just starting to be appreciated.

If you’re found to be non-compliant after May 25th, fines can reach €20 million!

Even if you’re dabbing beads of relief off your brow because GDPR doesn’t specifically apply to you, if you’re found to be non-compliant after May 25th, fines can reach €20 million, or four percent of your yearly global gross, whichever is higher. Not fun. But security-wise, this is the way the web is going, and a bit of forward thinking now could save you several migraines later.

The goal of the recruitment process is to find the best person for the job. It is doubtful that anyone will disagree with this statement. The disagreement comes in the definition of “the best person.” Is this the best man? Or the best woman? Or the best young person? Or the best ethnic minority or… well you get the idea. Most larger organizations have someone in the human resources function that understands that there is a legal foundation in the hiring process that must be paid heed. This legal foundation is almost global in its application. Unfortunately many businesses don’t have an understanding of this foundation.

U.S. legal foundation

In the United States there are a number of laws that govern the recruitment and hiring process. Foremost among these is the Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964. This law laid the foundation of antidiscrimination law that has been expanded on in the following half-century. It says you cannot discriminate against a candidate or employee on the basis of their race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, pregnancy, or genetic make-up.

Additionally, if you are a contractor with the U.S. government you must also pay attention to veteran status. Under Federal law, sexual orientation is not a protected class but many states do define sexual orientation as a protected class in employment discrimination. That is an important distinction to understand. When hiring an individual in the U.S. it is important to not only know the federal laws but also the laws of the particular states in which you are hiring and in some cases even smaller jurisdictions, such as cities. California is well known for having employment laws that are more restrictive than other states.

Other U.S. laws

It is not just Equal Employment Opportunity laws that govern the employment process. There are several other laws or regulations wrapped around the hiring process. These include:

• The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 that makes it illegal to hire workers that do not have the legal right to work in the U.S. This law requires that an employee produce the proper documentation no later than the end of the third day of their employment. If they do not the employer is required to terminate them.

• The Fair Credit Reporting Act covers the employment background checking process. If an employer uses a third party to check an applicant’s background the applicant has to be informed, provide consent and made aware of the results if those results form the basis for an adverse decision.

• The National Labor Relations Act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of the involvement with a labor union.

• The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures defines process for uncovering adverse discrimination that is generally unintentional and may be unknown until applying the “four-fifths” analysis.

As you can see the process of hiring someone in the U.S. is not just a simple matter saying, “Wow, they fit what we need, lets hire them.”

The  Compliance Lesson

The lesson to be learned here is that hiring is not just a simple matter. Some study is important in the process before you begin. Understand the laws in the country or state in which you are doing your hiring. It may take you a bit longer to get started but the time spend will be well worth the effort in the avoidance of problems.

Mike Haberman is the HR Compliance Guy. He is a HR consultant and Partner at OmegaHRSolutions. Photo Credit WearyWorker.

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