8 Do's to Upgrade Recruiting and On-Boarding
By Catherine Eberlein Pfister
e've all heard horror stories about someone's first day at a new job—and you've likely had unsavory experiences of your own. During the recruiting phase, everything tends to come up blooming flowers. Then somewhere during the on-boarding and orientation process, it turns to a dried arrangement. It begs the obvious question: What can we do to make it better?
To provide some insight, we scoured resources from employee engagement companies to recruiting experts, human resources, recognition pros and career coaches. We reviewed best practices across different industries and different size companies. We looked for commonalities and good common-sense ways to improve recruiting, on-boarding and orientation processes. Here's what we found.
Look at Your Company From the Outside In
Look at the first three do's to gain insights and information to create a great on-boarding and orientation experience:
1. Do evaluate your recruiting experience from the potential employee's perspective.
This technique works for great customer service companies that design their customer service experience from the customer's point of view. The messages that your company communicates to potential employees (and subsequently to new hires) is where the rubber meets the road. It's here that the external messages meet the internal messages. And it lays the groundwork for trouble or success down the road—in the interviewing process as well as new employee orientation.
Find out how your company is perceived from the outside looking in by asking some of the following questions:
- What is your company's reputation? What three adjectives describe the company culture? Do those adjectives align with company values?
- How would you describe the work environment? Is there camaraderie?
- Are there opportunities for career development? Do you offer mentoring?
- Do you make work-life balance initiatives a priority?
- What types of corporate social responsibility programs are supported? Do employees volunteer for local charities?
- What types of employee achievements are recognized? How do they fit with company values?
- Do your corporate messages about mission, values and the importance of people align with each other? Are they consistent? Do they honestly reflect your corporate culture and its values? Are they true in your work environment?
Review your company's recruiting messages and practices with all who are involved: your human resources team, your management team, your front-line supervisors, recently hired employees and current employees. Ask your current employees what made them join the company and what makes them stay.
Today's employees want to know whether your company celebrates and rewards employees who consistently contribute to the organization. They value corporate social responsibility and a company that recognizes the need for balance between their roles and responsibilities at work and their roles, responsibilities and life outside of the office. Younger employees, in particular, are looking for opportunities for career development and expect constant feedback from their managers.
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