The COVID-19 pandemic caused dramatic shifts throughout society, including the workplace. Teams are becoming more diverse and spread apart as a result of hybrid and remote work policies. More interestingly, the pandemic gave way to “The Great Resignation,” resulting in record numbers of people searching for more favorable positions and increased scrutiny on the policies, benefits and cultures of workplaces.
The way your company recruits and onboards new talent is a valuable step to boost workplace satisfaction and employee retention. Utilizing an HR onboarding automation system can help with the demands of this rapidly evolving hiring climate, while saving time, money and resources for your HR team.
What is Automated Onboarding?
Typical new hire onboarding is a multi-step process that runs across several departments and individuals with the goal of introducing newly hired talent to their role, team and company.
HR onboarding automation is the use of software to automate processes and digitize manual steps involved with bringing on new hires. These manual steps can include items like:
- Scheduling an orientation and tour of the office
- Employee review and signature of company agreements or policies
- Departmental requests and approvals, such IT device requests
What are the Benefits of Automating Onboarding?
Workplace satisfaction starts at the onboarding process. An efficient onboarding process results in better organization and new talent feeling empowered.
Here are a few other benefits you can expect by automating your onboarding process:
Your onboarding process is standardized: Creating a standard onboarding process for your company allows your HR team to move seamlessly through the new hire process, while staying organized with the required paperwork and signatures required to bring new talent aboard.
Improve your HR team’s productivity: Automation streamlines the employee onboarding experience, so even the smallest HR teams can keep up with introducing new talent, while staying on top of other core responsibilities, such as recruitment and employee support.
Your onboarding process feels personalized: There are plenty of opportunities to plan points of contact between new employees and team members when automating the onboarding process. Making the most of them allows the process to feel personal and full of human connection, which can fuel the natural excitement that comes with a new opportunity.
New talent becomes productive sooner: Onboarding automation makes it easy to get employees up and running sooner by creating a streamlined process to help them start the training process, get introduced to their role — including any software or hardware needed to fulfill their job duties — and ultimately begin their first assignments.
What are the Four Levels of Onboarding?
Most onboarding processes happen in four levels. Categorizing your existing procedures into these four levels and determining the departments or individuals involved is the first step to automating your onboarding processes.
- Pre-Onboarding: This is the time after a candidate accepts a job offer. Typical tasks include gathering new hire and payroll documentation, as well as sending out any necessary supplies to remote employees
- Onboarding: Start of the official onboarding process. The initial onboarding starts on the new hire’s first day. It includes welcoming the new hire to their team and introducing them to the company.
- Training: After the initial onboarding phase starts the training phase. This is where the new hire will get more in-depth information about their role and become familiar with their duties.
- Post Onboarding: The final phase can begin after training or coincide with it, but this is where productivity begins, with the trainee is being assigned their first tasks and due dates.
How Do You Automate the HR Onboarding Process?
After careful analysis of current onboarding procedures, use an onboarding solution that can digitize the manual parts of your process, including:
Document Management: Use electronic forms to collect essential new hire paperwork, route it to relevant stakeholders, and securely store it.
Benefits Enrollment: Track when a new hire becomes eligible for benefits, send over the appropriate documentation and route it back to HR.
Software Enrollment: Automatically notify your IT department when a new hire starts and initiate the process of integrating them into your company’s digital ecosystem.
New Hire Training: Assign trainings and notify the appropriate team members needed to support your new hire during their training period.
How To Choose the Best Onboarding Solution
Finding the best solution is dependent on the exact needs of your organization. When considering choosing onboarding automation software, here are three things to consider:
Usability: Your onboarding automation solution should be easy to use and easy for your team to adapt to.
Features: Ensure your solution has the capabilities needed to streamline and support your HR team’s onboarding efforts.
Integrations: Your onboarding solution should easily integrate and support the software your organization has implemented.
In addition, many solutions today offer prebuilt automation templates that organizations can use right out of the box. This enables workplaces to jumpstart automation without taking the time to automate processes from scratch.