April 11, 2022

Work is Changing – Time to Upgrade Your New Hire Onboarding Process In 3 Easy Steps

Sam Caucci

VHS tapes from the 80s. DVDs from the turn of the century. Powerpoint presentations that wouldn’t look out of place in Office Space. When it comes to onboarding new employees, old-school isn’t a good look.

For new hires, nothing is more disheartening than a shoddy-looking onboarding process. There’s a reason that the long, boring employee onboarding videos have become memetic online. Your onboarding process is the first taste that any employee will have of your company culture. It’s your first impression. If you aren’t providing the best employee onboarding experiences, you’re going to be sowing the seeds of morale issues right from day one.

Here we’re going to go through the basics of putting together a modern, efficient onboarding process that doesn’t make new hirers want to bolt for the door immediately.

Why Onboarding Matters

The real challenge often seems to be in finding the right recruits. There’s a temptation to put most of the emphasis on the scouting, less on the onboarding. We get it. If your recruits are so great (and we’re sure they are), then they can probably figure out what they need to know, on the job, right?

Reports show about half of all employees will be fired or will quit during the first six months at a new company. All that effort and money put into recruitment and onboarding goes right down the drain. Improving this ratio of failure isn’t just about improving your recruitment process. At some point, the money you are pouring into it isn’t going to give you any more return.

Where you can make a difference is in those critical first days. The best employee onboarding experiences and product knowledge training are where you can slice down the churn rate of your employees.

How to Modernize Your Onboarding

Okay, so modern employees demand modern onboarding. Makes sense. But how do you go about developing the best employee onboarding experiences possible? You don’t have to be a prominent Silicon Valley tech company to deploy some common sense onboarding upgrades.

Here are the basics before you start.

#1 Digitize

If you’re still printing manuals or turning all your training into PowerPoint presentations, just stop right there. Nothing makes a new employee feel more expendable than being handed a manual that everybody knows they won’t read. Employees expect material that they can easily access on their phones or, at worst, their laptops.

#2 Gamify

So what’s truly the point of product knowledge training and other onboarding processes? You want new employees to quickly learn the information they need to succeed at your company, right? Nobody wants to try and sift through an info dump first thing at work, let alone in a world with ever-climbing rates of attention deficiency.

A gamified training platform is a great way to get the best employee onboarding experience possible. Employees will actually look forward to learning the information for their job and take it as a challenge rather than a chore. And you can observe leaderboards on your employees to be absolutely sure that they retain the most important information.

#3 Go the Extra Mile

As mentioned, what new employees really dislike about traditional onboarding methods is how it makes them feel like a product, not a person. They have information thrown at them, and then they’re off to the next point on the onboarding assembly line.

One of the biggest complaints among new employees is how little time they get to meet the people hiring them. It pays to go the extra mile. Take a day to show the new employee the ropes. If you can’t make the time, find a mentor figure to accompany your new hire through their first day. The best employee onboarding experiences are the ones that make it seem like you have as much to offer the employee as they have to offer you.