Page 263 - Successful Onboarding

244 • Successful Onboarding

staff as well as helping develop a bond with Booz Allen itself that would
ultimately add value and reduce attrition.
A number of ideas circulated as to how the firm might improve the
onboarding experience for new hire intake. Proposals included fostering
more consistent experiences among new hires, doing more to help experi-
enced hires understand the culture, and building early wins with structured
networking opportunities. Booz Allen dedicated considerable resources to
the diagnostic phase of its redesign, working to assemble a representative
team that cut across functions, business units, and geographies. This core
team focused on formulating hypotheses and gathering internal data that
was then analyzed to help prioritize the opportunities. Over time, a collec-
tive vision of a new onboarding program that would better serve the firm
took shape. Executive Vice President and Chief Personnel Officer at Booz
Allen, Horacio Rozanski, spoke of priorities and vision for the new program:
“Developing an onboarding program that captured and conveyed the cul-
ture of Booz Allen was paramount. It is critical to us that our new hires
understand and internalize the firm’s core values.” The redesign team even-
tually concluded that cosmetic changes to specific onboarding program ele-
ments were unnecessary, and that the more significant opportunity involved
enhancement of Booz Allen’s basic relationship with new employees.
Booz Allen has long distinguished its employer-employee compact
by providing hires an opportunity to work on challenging, high-impact/
important projects—a distinction reflected in the firm’s strong employ-
ment brand. In fact, the company had won numerous awards for its
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employment value proposition. Still, the team realized that if they could
expand this compact and offer hires even greater support, then hires could
realize an even greater sense of the opportunities available as part of a
career at Booz Allen. Their loyalty to the firm would increase and attri-
tion would decrease. Booz Allen’s new onboarding program would be
designed to not only show new hires all the resources available to support
their long-term development; it would also provide significant value dur-
ing the first year by offering experiences that engaged them on these issues.
Additional value would come via associations and a sense of community
that the onboarding program would nurture among the firm’s 22,000
highly talented employees, who represent an array of skill sets and exper-
tise. If onboarding could foster meaningful connections between new hires