Page 18 - Successful Onboarding

Introduction • 7

tuned, albeit expensive, recruitment engines. Companies that recruited
regionally now routinely conduct national searches with increased sophis-
tication, support, and investment. Governments and non-profits are
rethinking their recruitment and retention strategies given increased avail-
ability of top talent from the private sector. Although these organizations
have increased access to A-level recruits, the focus must reside on retain-
ing these new hires for the long term rather than risking high attrition.
Of course, long-term social trends have made retention more difficult.
Responding in large part to firms’ almost complete abandonment of pen-
sions, young entering employees have shifted their attitudes toward
prospective employers, with lifetime employment at a single firm becom-
ing a stale and uninteresting concept. As we have all experienced, today’s
younger workers have different—and in some ways, grander—expecta-
tions about employment. They seek meaningful careers, not merely well-
paying jobs. As a result, the best and the brightest give weight to the
prospective employer’s employment brand, and more specifically to the
company’s plan for them during their first year on the job and beyond.
Even during hard economic times, these recruits are thinking beyond the
first 30 days and focusing instead on what employers can do to address
their long-term aspirations.
To meet recruitment and retention challenges, leading firms are explor-
ing how to redefine the employer-employee compact. To that end, they
are pursuing state of the art onboarding programs even during recessions,
when job markets are tighter. For some human capital teams, it’s a ques-
tion of preparing for the inevitable economic upswing that will also incite
a hiring uptick; a recession presents an opportunity to revamp and revi-
talize onboarding programs. Additionally, recessions produce a surplus of
top talent, and companies that are selectively hiring want to ensure that
they can retain these high achievers once bad times end.
Beyond the challenges of recruitment and retention, productivity is per-
haps the most important reason onboarding has taken on such immense
strategic relevance for progressive firms. In today’s service-based and
knowledge-based economy, new employee onboarding provides organi-
zations with a critical means to retain the value and increase the produc-
tivity of one of their most important assets: human capital. And if done
right, onboarding provides companies with the opportunity not only to