Overall, employee onboarding is a complex undertaking. As a result, many organizations have questions about how to manage it properly. To help companies on their journey, we’ve compiled a list of the most valuable employee onboarding questions and answers, ensuring your organization has what it needs to navigate these waters effectively.
1. How Should Staffing Firms Approach Onboarding?
In many cases, recruitment agencies use processes provided by client companies to handle onboarding responsibilities. However, not every client will use that approach. As a result, staffing firms should create basic onboarding procedures for candidates they’re placing. Cover basic details like timesheets, safety, company culture, known expectations, and understood responsibilities, ensuring the new hire has solid footing.
2. How Do You Keep Mass Onboarding Engaging?
Mass onboarding commonly involves more lecture-style strategies, which aren’t always the most engaging. Make sure to incorporate interactive elements frequently, such as Q&As, role-playing, facility tours, and large-scale meet-and-greets to mix things up.
3. What Steps Should You Take to Prepare an Onboarding Buddy?
Assigning a new hire a buddy at their new workplace gives them a go-to contact for questions. However, for the relationship to provide value, you need to prepare the buddy for their role. Discuss the need for check-ins, encourage the occasional social meeting, outline what expertise they should initially focus on, and create an effective communication strategy to ensure they’re ready.
4. How Can Companies Support Managers to Ensure the Onboarding Experience Is Positive?
Providing ample support to managers that will handle the onboarding of new hires is essential. Ideally, companies should engage with managers during the creation of onboarding processes and procedures, allowing them to provide insights about challenges and obstacles.
Additionally, ensuring managers understand why onboarding is valuable is vital. Similarly, providing sufficient training makes a difference.
5. What Amount of Work Is Reasonable During the Preboarding Process?
Since a new hire isn’t officially on your payroll during preboarding, it’s wise to keep the amount of work requested reasonable. Focus on distributing key information about the company, including relevant handbooks. Additionally, provide all critical new hire paperwork. Otherwise, keep any other interactions fun, light, or social, ensuring you aren’t overdoing it.
6. How Long Does It Take to Accurately Assess the ROI of an Updated Onboarding Process?
Generally speaking, it can take up to eight months to see an ROI after updating your onboarding process. The exact time depends on the size of your organization, how often you hire, and other factors, so keep that in mind when estimating the timeline. However, by introducing the right HR technologies, you can typically experience a gain sooner rather than later.
7. How Do You Support Less Tech-Savvy New Hires?
Not every new hire is going to be tech-savvy. As a result, it’s wise to include information in the onboarding process to increase their comfort level with work-related technologies. Instructional video tutorials can be a solid choice, as well as using a micro-learning approach when introducing unfamiliar systems.
8. How Do You Support New Remote Hires?
With remote new hires, you need to make use of virtual onboarding tools. Along with training platforms and digital document delivery and signing, embrace video conferencing for critical discussions. Also, outline the available communications tools, as well as which is best in various scenarios. Finally, make sure the new hire is aware of all available resources that can help them in their role or can support their wellness.
9. How Do You Make Your Onboarding Process Meaningful to New Hires When Your HR Team Is Small?
When you have a smaller HR team, it makes onboarding more challenging. However, you can make it more meaningful to new hires by using the right approach. Request involvement from company leaders, department heads, and direct managers. Keep the content incredibly focused, too, as that will boost efficiency.
10. When Should HR Technology Play a Role in Onboarding, and When Is the In-Person Approach Best?
With the right HR technology, onboarding is far more efficient. However, balancing it with in-person interaction is essential. While you may want to provide information and initial training digitally, make sure early discussions regarding duties and expectations are face-to-face.
Bottom Line
Ultimately, the answers above can help you craft a comprehensive and meaningful onboarding journey. If you want to streamline your onboarding process, Essium’s technology can help. Contact us to learn more about how our solutions can benefit your staffing agency
