Moving someone seamlessly from job offer to starting work, or employee onboarding, is a critical stage for business growth and success in many organisations.

Here are our top three tips to help you get onboarding right:

1) Engage early

Start engaging with your candidate as soon as you’ve made the offer. It shows that you’re already thinking of them as an employee before they arrive.

Good candidates are hard won. Your business needs to impress them at the interview stage; when the candidate becomes an employee and in the crucial onboarding stage in between.

In many cases, there’s a gap between recruitment and employment, when candidates have little or no contact with the company they’re joining. Bridging that gap, with a robust onboarding process, can help make the move from recruitment to employment a seamless and positive experience, for both the employee and the hiring organisation.

2) Think digitally

Even in organisations where contracts, offer letters and supporting documents are sent out by email, there’s still a need for candidates to print, complete and return those documents. That can lead to delays in getting someone started, and an extra burden on HR teams who have to chase up candidates for details.

Using digital technology not only makes it easier for candidates to complete, sign and return documents relating to their employment, it’s also far more likely to engage them with your business.

According to recent research carried out by webonboarding, HR decision makers spent an average of 24% of their time on the onboarding process.

Using digital technology to manage your employee onboarding can make it significantly more efficient, as both the onboardee and HR teams have greater understanding of where they are in the process.

By automating the onboarding process, HR professionals and candidates are reminded of tasks they need to complete or information they need to provide, without the need for constant chasing via email and telephone.

Taking the onboarding experience into the digital domain doesn’t mean it becomes impersonal, in fact, it’s quite the opposite. You can tailor communications with personal messages and give candidates control over some aspects of their onboarding, for example by allowing them to choose aspects of their training.

3) Use onboarding to strengthen your employee brand

Your employee brand is your reputation. Employee experience should be given the same level of attention as customer experience. Impressing candidates with a well-stocked desk when they start is great, but you’re missing a trick if you only focus on onboarding from day one of employment.

Melanie Guy, HR manager for webexpenses says: “As an employer, if you don’t impress and keep the experience positive, or fail to keep lines of communication open between the offer stage and day one, the feedback about your organisation will be negative. That can make it more difficult to turn a new employee into a productive member of your staff. And, word gets around, so as they share their experience, it makes it harder to attract, recruit and retain the next person into your organisation.”

In summary

Engage early, use digital technology to keep communications open and treat onboarding as part of your employer brand, and you can create an effective onboarding process. By the time onboardees arrive for day one, they are one step closer to becoming productive employees.