In the recruitment and selection process the onboarding of new talent is often left as an afterthought. Great onboarding for new employees is an essential part of keeping people long term. It gets very expensive to recruit and retain great talent so organisations should invest in an onboarding and welcome programme that makes new recruits feel at ease. There is nothing worse than those first awkward hours and days in a new job and being subjected to tedious generic onboarding videos along with signing NDA’s and agreeing to misconduct procedures. This can leave new recruits feeling somewhat overwhelmed and in worst cases can lead to doubts about their decision to join the organisation. This first day awkwardness and ‘process heavy’ onboarding can be eased somewhat by using an onboarding mentor or ‘welcome buddy’. What are the key steps to consider when using the onboarding mentoring approach?
- The mentor – should be someone who really knows the organisation, has a positive attitude towards their employer’s culture and environment along with a friendly and helpful disposition.
- Timing – the appointed mentor should make contact with the new recruit before any official start day so they can make formal introductions and answer any specific onboarding questions.
- Availability – the appointed mentor should have sufficient time allocated to fulfil this role and make themselves available to new recruits for guidance and to answer any questions.
Having a good mentor is part of the talent management process and helps to drive development of both the new employee and the mentor. The mentor can play a key role in networking within the organisation and in referencing for future promotional roles for example.
An onboarding mentoring programme will reduce employee turnover in the long term and it has been suggested that the impact of a poor onboarding experience can lead to staff turnover increasing by as much as 50% in the first three years. Many organisations prefer to appoint onboarding mentors from the initial interviewing panel as it provides a consistent friendly face throughout the entire recruitment and selection process with a natural follow through to onboarding. Companies that are increasing efficiency and cost reduction in their recruitment processes can give more focus to their onboarding programmes and the use of mentors and hiring tech tools can provide that efficiency and cost reduction.
One such company who are game changing the face of recruitment by providing a robust process to ensure more efficient recruitment using any channel is Hire Digital, a start-up recruitment company with a global presence that has invested heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage the digital tech recruitment process. Their talent management software platform gives digital talent recruiters a strict criterion for posting job adverts and descriptions and their AI works in such a way that it generates a much smaller more targeted candidate list by using up to 40,000 attributes. They key to this is efficiency, recruiters spend less time generating job advertisements and trawling through hundreds of CV’s to get their shortlist, Hire Digital tech can rapidly access up to 1bn talent globally.
Hire Digital is an AI technology with a human touch that is completely revolutionising the recruitment and selection process. It’s two times faster, 50 % cheaper and ten times more accurate than traditional hiring tech. To find out more speak to Robin Brohl at Hire Digital he is a real person and would love to engage with you and help you streamline your recruitment processes.