There’s a critical period in every recruitment process, where all your best efforts can so easily come undone….
At best, it may only be costing you a small fortune through inefficiency and lost productivity.
At worst, it’s also costing you quite few first choice candidates every year.
That’s despite all the exhaustive and expensive efforts put toward;
- candidate search;
- screening;
- interviewing;
- testing;
- negotiating….
What is this critical period?
It’s the period of time that lies between:
“You’re the candidate we want”…. and……”Welcome to your first day”.
Between those two points there exists in most companies so many hidden costs, process inefficiencies, and avoidable delays, they create a virtual ‘black hole’ into which budgets, efficiency, and even the occasional first-choice candidate can disappear completely.
Welcome to…. reality
Everything’s great during the interview phase: employers and candidates sell themselves to each other as professional, efficient and leading-edge operators. But your very best corporate image can be undermined once the perfect candidate experiences the business reality of a slow-paced and outdated employee onboarding process.
The problem is:
Getting a candidate from job offer to day one normally involves a stack of paperwork, and costly, laborious processes – drafting of documents, multiple internal approvals and notifications even before the paperwork can be printed, collated, then posted… and then the wait for its return.
Most companies take one to two weeks just to send out an offer. Administrative, process and postal delays take up critical time while your hand-picked candidate might be fielding other offers.
First-choice or second best?
Industry estimates run at about 5% for the number of first choice candidates who are lost thanks simply to delays in the hiring process. Sure, you might then get the second or third choice candidate, but do you go through all the effort of recruitment to end up with the next-best option, when all you need is a better process?
Also consider the organisational culture you want to display: Does your current HR onboarding process tell the new employee they’re joining an efficient, streamlined organisation? Or slow, disjointed and cumbersome? Looking from a candidate’s viewpoint; which company would you join? What culture or mindset would you like your newest employees to bring on day one?
Better Ways – technology to the rescue
Many companies are making significant cost and time savings with the adoption of leading edge software and technology solutions for onboarding their new employees.
A dedicated, onboarding solution can deliver the following benefits, in a fraction of the time and cost of manual processing:
- Forms, contracts and documentation all exist on-line for paperless efficiency
- Standardised letters of offer and contracts for all roles are easily customised to a specific candidate.
- Documents reviewed and approved electronically by appropriate manager/s
- Candidates receive their offers, contracts, and required forms on-line, or via a secure web portal.
- Candidates can accept offers and complete forms on-line using a legally-binding ‘digital signature’
- No requirement for storing paperwork or scanning documentation – an electronic audit trail and archive is automatically created
- Relevant managers can have full oversight of all candidate’s progress via on-line reports or dashboards
Instead of taking weeks, everything can often be approved, issued, accepted and returned within days.
Considering your own processes for onboarding a new candidate; how many staff hours or days does it take? Multiply the time and costs by your hires per year: 50? 100? 200?
That’s half the battle won….
But there’s another ‘productivity gap’ in onboarding: The problem of getting everything ready for the new recruit to hit the ground running. How often does an eager new employee sit idle and unproductive for their first week because ‘somebody didn’t speak to someone’, or forgot to order the;
workstation, furniture, email, telephone, network drive, password, payroll ,security pass, business cards…
Solutions now exist to automate these numerous internal notifications required to ensure a new employee is equipped and enabled for work. Every relevant department from IT to facilities to payroll can be automatically notified of the needs and timeframe of each new starter.
An automated process cuts out the miscommunications or administrative glitches. What this means for a business is greater productivity; operational employees from ‘day one’, instead of the typical ‘week two’!
New smarts for new starts
The use of smart onboarding technology can turn the ‘black hole’ danger period into an enormous window of opportunity;
- to drastically cut the time and costs involved in onboarding;
- to sign and win your candidates faster;
- to get your new recruits up, running and productive so much sooner.
The bonus for organisational culture is the message to new employees that they are joining a professional and efficient company making the most of leading-edge technology.
Twenty years of consulting experience has taught us some valuable lessons about HR/Payroll operations. We thought we should share them, because let’s face it, everyone wants to know how they can save time and money.
Organisational restructures. What a pain! Rows and columns of data, business rules to meet, people to collaborate with all within a tight deadline. Does this sound familiar?
