Onboarding essentials: 7 best practices for your business

Employee onboarding – the process of welcoming and integrating new employees into the business – sets the tone for a new hire’s success. Do it right and you accelerate the newbie’s integration and productivity, quickly make them feel at home, and reduce the risk of them leaving prematurely. Do it poorly, though, and you can leave a new hire confused, frustrated, and much more likely to quit. 

Ultimately, if you want to improve talent retention, you need to make a great first impression – and that means carefully planning each new employee’s first day, first week and first few months.  

Here are seven best practices to get new hires off to a flying start:

1. Have an onboarding plan in place

All businesses should have a structured onboarding plan, starting with everything the employee needs to know before they even arrive for their first day, and stretching right through to the first three – or even six – months in the job. Onboarding plans will typically cover:

• Pre-arrival activities, such as sending a welcome email, arranging documents that need to be completed before arrival, and providing any resources the employee needs in advance.
• Information that introduces the company’s mission, values, organisational structure, HR policies, and so on.
• First day/week orientation. This includes having a clear itinerary for the first day, preparing the employee’s workspace and technology, arranging team introductions, organising a team lunch, and scheduling relevant HR sessions.
• Learning and development requirements that are specific to the employee’s role.
• A system for ongoing check-ins and feedback sessions over the first three or six months.

2. Clarify job expectations

One of the biggest gripes new employees have is not fully understanding what’s expected of them. It goes without saying that all employees should be given a clear job description. But going beyond that, it’s essential you ensure new hires fully grasp their role responsibilities, understand their goals and relevant KPIs, and – importantly – understand how their work contributes to the organisation’s wider goals. 

3. Assign a mentor or buddy

A nice touch is to assign a go-to person that can give informal support, answer any questions the new hire may have, and make introductions to other team members (and other teams in the business). Not only is this thoughtful and welcoming, it’s a very practical way to ease the transition and integration. 

4. Make use of onboarding technology

There are many tools that promise to streamline the onboarding process, for example, by automating tasks like document submission and compliance tracking. They can also provide virtual training modules that employees can access anytime. We all know the first week in a new job can be completely overwhelming, so having continual access to onboarding training materials, via a virtual platform, means the new hire can absorb information at their own pace.

5. Continually emphasise culture 

Cultural fit is one of the biggest factors in employee satisfaction and retention. So it’s vital you embed culture in the onboarding process, by weaving company values and traditions into every step of the experience. For example, you might encourage new hires to participate in company events, invite them to join organised volunteering efforts, involve them in team rituals (Tuesday night bowling, anyone?), and create opportunities for them to meet company leadership, so they can see how leadership embodies the company values. Don’t scrimp on this. If you want new hires to stick around, embedding culture is just as important as getting them up-to-scratch on job skills. 

6. Measure, measure, measure

As the old business saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. In other words, you need to track your onboarding effectiveness to understand what works and where the onboarding process could be improved. Typical metrics to measure include time to productivity, new employee satisfaction rates, and retention rates among new employees. As we said above, it’s also important to have a system where new hires can give and receive feedback throughout the onboarding period.  

7. Choose the right recruitment company 

If you choose your recruitment partner well, it makes onboarding so much easier. Sure, we would say that, being a recruitment company. But hear us out. Recruitment agencies aren’t just about finding talent – we’re about matching candidates with employers based on skills and cultural fit. Candidates that aren’t the best cultural fit can certainly learn to meld with the company culture over time, but it does make the onboarding process more complicated. 

By understanding your company culture and finding candidates that are an ideal fit, we reduce the risk of mismatched hires. This in itself makes onboarding easier. But we also aid the onboarding process by preparing candidates for their new position – giving them the info they need to get to know the company, understand their role, and grasp important values. Think of it as ‘pre-boarding’. Whatever you call it, the goal is simple: a smooth transition for your business and your new hire.

At Roc Search, we exist to support your talent acquisition and talent retention. Let’s chat about your talent needs.