5 Effective Onboarding Practices Featuring iCIMS

Onboarding is one of the most important processes within the recruitment life-cycle. The successful adjustment of newcomers is essential for facilitating their performance, engagement, and retention.

Recently SHRM conducted a survey of organizations’ onboarding programs, and found that onboarding has become a key part of retention strategy for 72% of respondents. In addition, 61% of respondents have started onboarding earlier, with more attention to recruitment, providing information to ensure fit and set expectations.

As HR professionals have awakened to the importance of onboarding, technology providers like iCIMS have responded to their needs. With onboarding solutions from iCIMS, employers are able to more effectively engage with their new hires and automate and streamline this most important element of talent management.

Effective Onboarding Practices

The costs associated with substandard onboarding programs are high- including the cost of rehiring people who don’t fit in with the company, and the costs of low productivity for employees who are not properly trained and engaged.

By implementing an interactive and individualized onboarding process, you can reduce new hire time to productivity, cut employee turnover, and positively impact the bottom line. Use these five key points to ensure that your onboarding process helps you meet your talent management goals:

1. Engage: Your onboarding program creates the employee’s first impression of your organization, and should immediately envelop the new hire into the company culture. Branded onboarding portalsare a great way to impart your culture, instill your corporate values, and present your procedures. Notice how in iCIMS’ own internal employee onboarding system, their new hires are greeted immediately with fun pictures of employees, ways to meet colleagues, and methods to engage with social media. Their CEO makes a personal greeting through embedded video.
2. Motivate: Onboarding programs should attract the attention of job applicants and provide incentive for new hires to hit the ground running. With an onboarding solution, you can communicate what the organization offers to employees in exchange for their contributions, including pay, benefits, development opportunities, and opportunities for recognition. You can also show career path opportunities within your organization to help new employees better understand both their current role and future prospects.
3. Educate: The best onboarding programs provide employees with the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to successfully perform required job tasks. Firstly, new hires must become familiar with the unique technical language, acronyms, and jargon used at work. It is also vital that they understand the company’s history, product mix, competitive position, mission, goals, and strategies. By using an effective onboarding program, new hires can learn about the company’s spot in the marketplace, and immediately align their activity with business goals.
4. Automate: Successful onboarding programs engage the employee and convey the corporate message. However, it’s also important to have a systematized method for completing required paperwork and new employee set-up tasks. Ideally, the process should eliminate reliance on paper documents, and allow the new employee to easily retrieve documents electronically, prior to the first day of work. Workflow for the HR or recruitment professional should be task oriented, with real time updates, email notifications, and stakeholder dashboards. Check-lists and a centralized onboarding portal and repository achieve productivity for both the new hire and the internal HR/recruitment employee.
5. Monitor: When asked, “To what extent is follow up or monitoring done to make sure formal onboarding activities or programs are actually happening as designed in your organization,” 54% of organizations surveyed by SHRM reported using either little to no monitoring or just occasional spot monitoring of their onboarding programs. With an effective onboarding program, you should be able to easily track candidates in the onboarding process in real time. You should also be able to quickly run reports to measure global metrics on HR productivity and key performance benchmarks.

The iCIMS Onboarding Solution

iCIMS is a well recognized leader in talent management technology and an industry leader in customer service. They provide SaaS technology to enable and coordinate the entire recruitment and talent life-cycle. Their onboarding solution includes:

• New Hire Onboarding Portal
• Communication Center
• Electronic Form Management
• Task Management
• Onboarding Reports

Try the free candidate management software demo to discover how iCIMS’ Talent Platform can streamline your end-to-end talent management initiatives and facilitate a successful and cost-effective onboarding program for your organization.