Page 36 - Successful Onboarding

The Business Case for Onboarding • 25

employer. As shown later in this book, strategic onboarding fosters
engagement by helping new hires get excited about their work,
their career prospects, and the enterprise’s mission.
• Employment brand. All companies have employment brands in
the minds of current and prospective employees, recruiters, and
career counselors. Sometimes these brands are more pronounced
and positive, as in the case of firms who win “best place to work”
awards. If you’ve engineered a system that produces more
positive experiences more often, the message will get out.
A firm’s reputation will improve, making future prospects easier
to identify and cheaper to recruit. Moreover, you will attract the
kinds of new hires that your firm desires; that is, those attracted
by the specific cultural and performance values your brand
conveys. Negative experiences produce the opposite result by
eroding the firm’s employment brand through negative word of
mouth.
• Automation and standardization. We estimate that 80% or more
of medium and large businesses have onboarding processes that
are tedious and paper based, require multiple steps of manual
administration, are deployed across the enterprise in inconsistent
ways, lead to haphazard and wasteful outcomes, inefficiently
deploy resources challenging new hire readiness, and create
frustrating experiences for new hires and hiring managers.
Software can make this a more pleasant and lower-cost
experience for everyone involved.
• Consistency of experience. Many companies with existing,
piecemeal programs possess pockets of excellence around
onboarding, whether in specific functional areas, specific
locations, or other organizational units. A strategic approach
determines and applies best practices across every part of the
enterprise that brings in new hires. It helps firms avoid the
bitterness that arises when some employees enter smoothly, while
others have less positive experiences. In Columbia, South
Carolina, The Sisters of Charity Providence Hospitals, has vastly
improved its onboarding by standardizing its orientation program.