Time to onboard? Where do you start?

Now that you have finally found the best candidate for your team and they’ve accepted the offer, how do you ensure that all that time and effort pay off? One of the ways is to make sure that the transition from a new hire to an employee is a smooth one.

To do this, ask yourself a few questions:

1. When should onboarding start?
2. How would I know if it is done properly?
3. What impression do you want candidates to walk away with? and
4. How would you measure success?

If you are using digital tools to manage the recruitment process like an ATS system, it is easy to manage candidate recruitment from advertising the job role right up to hiring someone and initiating them as an employee. The step between recruiting a new hire and officially registering them as an employee is called onboarding. Onboarding involves filling in forms, collecting signed documents, dispatching the company handbook and then saving this paperwork under the candidate’s profile. This step is heavy on administration and requires a system to manage and track the onboarding of new hires. Processes that are paper-intensive and repetitive are tedious, especially when you are working in a fast-paced work environment and other tasks are piling up.

Thankfully, the IT industry and software developers have identified this as a pain point and businesses now have software to help with the complex onboarding process.  A cloud-based customer onboarding software could help you streamline your business processes. It makes document processing and managing online submissions more efficient than ever and is ideal for speeding up onboarding processes for new hires. Frankly, onboarding software is the best way to close this gap, and integration with your ATS system whether it’s Workforce One, Bullhorn, Job Adder, FastTrack360; is now possible. It’s another step in the process that avoids the direct handling of paperwork.

Once the candidate profile is up and active on the system – onboarding can be done simply by clicking on the link and this will direct you to a section where all prerequisites can be issued based on a customised form.

Good news for the environment, such software is also a paperless solution and will help you reduce the company’s ecological footprint. Digitising paper-driven processes it’s another way your company can maintain their ISO credentials and prepare for auditing.

Onboarding new hires digitally is about simplicity and great planning that works effectively for your business and delivers a strong positive first impression to the new employee. Often those looking for work feel excluded and small touches are important. One way to tailor this experience is by creating bespoke web forms with your company logo to give it an authentic and professional appearance. Little personal touches that reflect employee branding makes candidates feel at ease and gives them a sense of belonging.

Another tip for onboarding new hires is to keep it simple. Now you have a recruitment management system – look at ways you can make things simpler for the candidate’s journey. Just like the way we are using Zoom and Google Meet to communicate in the absence of face to face meeting, use software that enhances and simplifies what you do to get the same result if you had to do this manually or face to face onboarding with the new hire. If you are new to technology, you always can view a demo and play around with it, test it, and see how easy software integration has become.

As a company continues to grow, HR processes and documents become more and more difficult to manage. In this case, onboarding software has created the ability for an HR portal that consolidates candidate information in one space. When you log in you have a clean dashboard that tells you exactly where you are within the hiring process. For those that you have already initiated the onboarding process, you can check their current status. A proper onboarding process gives you a clear chart of all the documents you need in order to onboard them as an employee. Making handover for team members super easy. The software has made onboarding as simple as possible for your organisation to keep all the employee documents in one place and manage the process more efficiently.

Onboarding software integrates directly with your ATS seamlessly and with one URL can send a welcome kit, documents to sign, or even the company handbook. Your new hire can complete their profession, personal, information and even upload signed documents. Your system will be fully compliant as all the required documentation is in place before the candidate starting their first day.

This is how you close the process, from offering someone a post and then getting them to their new job ready for orientation. The onboarding software covers this all. It creates a step by step onboarding process that can run repeatedly for any new hire you work with. An excellent hire process is never complete without a great onboarding experience.

Raj Soni is the Founder of Onboarded, an Australian developed HR Onboarding Software providing creative onboarding solutions for companies. Onboarded was developed to streamline the process for candidates and remove the requirement for paper forms and time consuming follow up. Onboarded works with most ATS platforms and Recruitment Software CRMs. Raj has an extensive background in IT and software design and has been in the industry for 20+ years.