Recruiter
(Extract)

Firms are wising up to the way they treat their new arrivals, particularly when they discover how much is lost in attrition costs. Sue Weekes reports

Workplace folklore has no shortage of tales concerning employees who turn up for work on their first day only to find no one is expecting them. While extreme examples, they serve to remind recruiters and resourcing professionals of the no-man’s land that can exist between job offer and day one, even in this enlightened era of talent management. Onboarding is designed to fill this potential void. It begins at the point of job offer by acclimatising the employee to the new company and can continue for three, six or even 12 months afterwards as the person gets up to speed in their new role. Research carried out by the Corporate Leadership Council showed that effective onboarding can have more than 20% impact on a person’s discretionary effort in their job by promoting employee engagement.

Onboarding activities that help bring about this change include clearly explaining job importance, responsibilities and performance objectives, as well as introducing new hires to other new employees. 

Ian Creamer, vice-president international HR of global data integration software company Informatica, says it uses a simple “crawl, walk and run” analogy. “We’re trying to get people through the crawling stage very quickly; walking within a few months, and running and truly making a difference as quickly as possible,” he explains. “If we can reduce the time it takes to get sales people effective by three to six months, this could mean half a million or a million dollars’ worth of revenue coming into the business earlier.”

Crossing the induction line

Debate continues as to where onboarding finishes and induction begins within organisations and so there is a grey area over whose responsibility onboarding should be. Increasingly a case is being made for onboarding to be owned by the resourcing department to ensure a vital link is established between attraction and recruitment and employment.

Paul Daley, director of HR consulting at recruitment process and HR outsourcing company Ochre House, says that resourcing must be accountable for onboarding even though it doesn’t necessarily control or deliver all the “touch points” in the process. “In those first six months you are building the psychological contract. An individual joins an organisation based on the beliefs and assumptions about how it’s going to pan out and these are either supported or not in this first period,” he says. “There is a big role in it for line managers but nonetheless the resourcing function needs to decide the policy and the strategy for the onboarding experience.”

Ron Eldridge, director of employee engagement and retention specialist TalentDrain, says that employee feedback from its online diagnostic tool OnBoarder shows that if something goes wrong in the early days in terms of their pre-joining expectations, it’s very hard to “pull it back”. “And a person’s tenure almost always won’t be as long and performance won’t be as good,” he says, adding that the reason things go wrong most often is because the reality of the job doesn’t live up to the promise.

Proactive processes pay off…

Those firms which take a more proactive, end-to-end view are those which are likely to be most successful. Lorna Bryson, Tesco’s head of resource/diversity UK and Republic of Ireland, says the process needs to begin “the minute” a person receives their joining letter through the door. “It’s really important people feel part of a team from the beginning,” she says.

Bryson adds that its recent work on the design of the onboarding and induction process is paying off. While Tesco enjoys high levels of retention in people who have been at the company more than 12 months (percentage-wise it was in the high 90s last year), she says it was losing people who’d been with the company less than a year. Now, following a corporate induction day and four weeks working in their department, the new programme sees employees return to induction. “They are a lot more confident after four weeks’ training in their department. They know their store and they come back with many more questions than they had on the first induction day,” says Bryson. “That has been really successful.”

… such as buddying and mentoring

Among the onboarding activities that are helping to improve retention is to use some form of buddying as part of the process. Informatica assigns pre-hire buddies at peer level to new starters in India where previously the company had experienced a fall-out between people accepting job offers and joining. This has proved successful and Creamer says it is in the process of rolling out a global new hire buddy scheme.

Buddying is also used in the public sector. Gillian Hibberd, corporate director (people, policy and communications) at Buckinghamshire County Council, says new senior managers are allocated an ’organisational buddy’, a peer officer whose role it is to explain the nuances of how the organisation works, and a ’portfolio buddy’, “who is a colleague on their senior management team who will explain how their service works and who does what”, she explains.

Technology tracking 

Many applicant tracking and talent management systems offer onboarding modules and Jodie Holway, senior product manager for Taleo Onboarding, reports that clients are configuring its system to meet the needs of their particular processes. “Some clients are focusing on mentoring and relationship-building for their new hires, others on regulatory compliance and costeffective e-paperwork,” she says. “And quite a few are doing all of the above plus getting new hire equipment prepared so it’s all ready before they walk through the door on day one.”

No matter how successful an onboarding programme proves, it should be regularly reviewed and updated. Attrition rates remain one of the best indicators and Hibberd says tracking this across both the first and second year of joining helps the council to identify any areas of concern in the process.