Bringing new employees on board -- the right way 10 February, 2008 By Patricia Pickett

According to Alice Snell, vice-president of Taleo Research, onboarding should be "a process that has been well-thought-out and placed in the organization to get that new hire energized, ready and able to be productive as soon as possible." However, there is a right way and a wrong way to go through this preparation process, she said.

"The wrong way is pretty easy to define," Snell said. "It's when someone shows up the first day and can't do their work because they may not have a place or the tools to do it. They might not be familiar with the team, or have a computer password or parking space." In worst-case scenarios, people have been sent home for days or weeks at a time to give their employers a chance to get their act together, she said.

Unfortunately, all the effort the employer has put into getting the employee excited about working for the organization can fizzle away with a negative first impression, said Adrienne Whitten, product marketing director with Dublin, Calif.-based Taleo. "That excitement is immediately turned into disappointment that affects the employee's entire tenure with the company."

One of the reasons the onboarding process often gets skimmed over is that it is not clear who should be responsible for it, Snell said. The recruiter has a difficult enough time making the hiring decision, and once that has been done, the responsibility for the new employee is handed off to the hiring manager. But since the new hire isn't actually in the building yet, the manager might not feel like his or her job has started.

Onboarding is supposed to happen during the interim point between the hiring decision and the start date, "but it is often not perceived as a value-add part of the process," Snell said. "The view is, 'Can't HR just get the paperwork done?'"

For smaller businesses where "the importance of each employee is so much more palpable," proper onboarding is even more crucial, said Snell. "It's key to integrate the person into the organization as quickly as possible."

However, in general, smaller companies tend to have fewer formalized hiring processes in place, and "sometimes (onboarding) doesn't seem as important and is not necessarily the highest priority," said Whitten. "There's a lot more ad-hoc activity going on, which leads to inconsistency in the onboarding experience of one new hire to the next."

A good onboarding process takes into consideration more than just the one-off transactional processes like paperwork, computers and parking spaces, Snell said. It's really about bridging the employer's positive messages about what it's like to work for the organization with what actually happens when the employee arrives.

Some organizations are taking advantage of automated onboarding tools to ease the process. For example, with the New Hire Portal from Taleo, new employees can log in and start completing paperwork days or weeks before their start date, said Whitten. "They can also get acclimated to the company, perhaps read a message from the CEO or more information about the company to get their feet on the ground, or even suggestions about good places to go for lunch near the office," she said. Employees will benefit from feeling like they are getting up to speed as quickly as possible, since "nobody likes the first few days or months of the learning curve," Whitten said.

For employers, the benefits of a good onboarding process include productivity, employee engagement and consistency and compliance, said Whitten. There are two sides to productivity: getting employees up to speed, as well as increasing the hiring manager's productivity, in addition to that of IT or any other department that is involved in preparing for the new hire's arrival. This is especially true if the process is automated, since some details might get missed in a manual process, she said.

Proper onboarding will also maximize the employer's chance of making a good first impression. "It makes a big difference when you walk in on your first day and they already have you set up with a name tag, computer and phone on your desk," Whitten said. Finally, the process of filling out forms and storing them will become much easier, especially if the new employee can do it online and ahead of time.