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The Onboarding Maturity assessment is a 5-steps framework used to analyze how well your company integrates best practices for Employee Onboarding.
What do the best-in-class companies do to attract, motivate, train, and retain their talent? The assessment will help you to evaluate the completeness, efficacy, and quality of Onboarding processes at your firm.
Let's discuss each of the 5 steps in detail.
1. First Impression
One of the features of employee Onboarding is that it does not start on Day 1. "When does it start then?" – well, that's a fair question.
It takes just 33 to 100 milliseconds to make a first impression, according to a study performed by the University of New York. Phycologists out of Princeton conclude that it takes 1/10 of a second to make our first impression about a person.
Does the same timing also apply to the candidates who try to form the initial impression about you as a future employer? While 1/10 of a second may seem like an extremely tiny bit of time, we need to be mindful of the ever-shrinking attention span of a human being in 2021. On average, you will have 8-12 seconds to make a great first impression on the candidate.
To minimize the churn of candidates coming to your company's webpage or seeing your job alert, it makes sense to invest in company branding and employer reputation. "Easier said than done," – you might rightfully note. But starting small can help – make sure your company profiles on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and other job-advertising platforms look consistent and clear. As much as you might think that hiring is a seller's market, hiring top-notch talent is certainly not. The best candidates will shop for the offers and make their pick. And your first impression should be strong enough to nudge your dream candidate to pick your company over competitors.
2. Interview Process
The conventional and old-school concept of the job interview is to select the candidate who can do the job. Preferably, better than anybody else in the pool of candidates who made it to the interview. However, conventional thinking tends to overlook that the job interview is also a chance for the candidate to choose the company.
Approaching people management strategically, you would want to integrate new hires as early as possible. And the job interview is a unique chance to unwrap non-sensitive information about your business and share it with the candidate.
Not only does it cost you zero, but it also allows you to pick on the brains of the applicants. As they progress through the interview stages, try sharing a real-life case and ask the candidate to demonstrate how she or he would approach it. According to the research of Robert Cialdini, a psychology professor at Arizona State University and a visiting professor at Standford, we tend to exhibit a very strong commitment to ideas that we have put in writing and to comply with our past behaviors.
Think about it this way – by the time you extend the offer to a successful candidate, she or he will already be emotionally invested in your company, given all the effort that was put into the preparation. It is also likely that the new joiner will keep up the great work in the future - this is how "compliance", a phenomenon that makes our past behaviors stick, works in human psychology.
Finally, if you decide not to proceed with the applicant - it was nonetheless a fair opportunity for the candidate to get to know your company.
3. Communication with the Successful Candidate
Going through the recruitment funnel is a resource-intensive exercise. Have you calculated the number of candidates you need to screen and interview to fill out the vacancy? If you are in the possession of such numbers, it means that you understand and control your recruitment funnel.
Say, you received 20 applications for a vacancy that you need to fill. After rounds of screening and interviews, you end up extending the job offer to the best candidate. It may seem like your job is done but you can't just lean back and expect the candidate to sign the offer. It may appear counterintuitive, but imagine being in the shoes of the job seeker for a moment. Would you just apply for one company and hope it works out? Or would you rather build a pipeline of potential options to diversify the recruitment risks? As you work out the recruitment funnel as a hiring manager, your dream candidate is building up the pipeline of employment options. Therefore, it is critical to work on the conversion from offers extended to offers signed.
Three things to improve conversion:
Give a clear picture of the future role, compensation, and perks in the job offer that you send to a candidate
Share related materials about the company, industry, team, and role, and when you send the job offer
Take the initiative to set up coffee chats or meetings for new joiners with future colleagues before their start date
4. Onboarding
Do you remember your first day at a new job? I don't necessarily recall what happened on that day, but I surely remember the 'office tour'. That one-hour-long exercise can make any introvert uncomfortable.
The morning I came to the office, the office manager took me for a floor tour and I had to introduce myself to 70 people going from desk to desk. After trying to remember 70 names in one hour, I felt nothing but frustration. Now you probably think, "that's because she is an introvert", – true, but I am not alone on that boat. According to the random sampling test performed by Myers-Briggs, the distribution of extroverts and introverts in the USA is pretty even. This result suggests that at least 50% of people are very likely to be uncomfortable with the floor tour described above. Okay, what does it have to do with Onboarding?
Onboarding has a crucial impact on how new joiners feel on their first day and – most importantly for your business – the first year at work. Based on the survey of 1,500 employees, managers, and HR professionals conducted by ADP, employees "highly satisfied with their Onboarding, were three times as likely to feel comfortable after their first day than those who were not satisfied, and almost twice as likely to feel comfortable later on in their first year."
What could have been done to make a new joiner's life easier on that first day?
Pairing a new joiner with a buddy before Day One. Have a buddy meet the new joiner before the first day and let them get to know each other. The same "office tour" would have left a completely different impression on the new joiner.
Share the Onboarding package before the start date with a clear schedule. So that office life doesn't come as a surprise.
Involve the teams in Onboarding along with the manager and HR. This way there would have been more familiar faces during the office tour.
5. Continuous Onboarding
Coming back to our 7 facts about Onboarding, the final point states that "Onboarding doesn't stop at the end of the probation period". After 3 months on the job, you would expect the new hires to become autonomous and start generating value.
Quoting Andy Grove again, – "All you can do to improve the output of an employee is motivate and train. There is nothing else".
Similarly to a physician diagnosing a patient before writing a prescription, the training has to start with the identification of the skill gaps. Have you been able to identify what particular skills are missing and diminish the performance of the employees and, ultimately, your business?
You can identify the skill gaps using a top-down approach. A top-down approach requires a clear view of the company strategy, followed by the identification of the roles required for reaching the strategic goals. The next step would be to create an inventory of skills for each role and contrast the "desired" skills with the skills the employees possess already. Any mismatches between desired and existing skills should point in the direction of the skill gaps.
To compare desired skills with the current skills, you will have to measure the current skills. There are multiple ways to do that and the best way is to combine several of them.
Weekly 1-on-1 meetings allow to accumulate performance data consistently and to compare the data across employees
Feedback from external parties (e.g. vendors, suppliers, customers)
Professional training and certifications
Surveys and assessment
Feedback from coworkers (360 Feedback)
Once the skill gaps are identified you can bridge them either by hiring or by training.
Want to learn where your company stands in terms of Onboarding Maturity? Try out our Onboarding Maturity Assessment below.
Evaluate Onboarding Maturity at Your Company
At Corpedios, we put together the best features of text, images, and videos to create an exceptional onboarding experience for employees at your company. Try onboarding new talent via a conversation that we tailor to your needs in our text message-based onboarding solution. Your coworkers and new hires text – would it be terrible to put it to good use?