As companies across India unleash mass hiring plans, the end in mind for any talent acquisition strategy is talent retention and that is the goal organisations continue to struggle with. One key differentiating factor in ensuring retention takes place at the very beginning of the employee cycle and this is none other onboarding. The right onboarding experience will play a decisive role in whether your new hire will stay or leave. According to a research report released by Brandon Hall Group, organisations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.
Given how HBR statistics highlight that nearly 33% of new hires look for a new position in their first six months on a job and 23% of employees leave before their first work anniversary, hiring costs are bound to be at an all time high and this is one thing that organisations wish to avoid. With increasing conversations centred around building the right workplace culture, leaders also need to factor in the critical role that is also played by onboarding. Moreover, this process when interweaved with learning and career development within the organisation will positively impact talent retention. As a study by Gallup shows, employees who strongly agree they have a clear plan for their professional development are 3.5 times more likely to strongly agree that their onboarding process was exceptional.
This is a critical time for organisations across industries to re-imagine and strengthen their onboarding processes to become future ready. As the talent market continues to be competitive and there is an urgent need to reduce hiring contents and retain the best of talent, technology can play a fundamental role in enabling a powerful onboarding experience and empowering your new hire to become productive at speed.
How can technology create an impactful onboarding experience?
Leaders need to actively acknowledge and recognise their goal from initiating an innovative and engaging onboarding process. This is none other than talent retention but alongside, they also need to ensure that their new hire embraces lifelong learning and adds value to their business by becoming productive faster and more efficiently. It is imperative that your new employees are integrated well acclimated to the company and their roles.
Some of the key strategies to pioneer this endeavour are:
- Investing in the right digital onboarding solution: A modern employee onboarding solution can help organisations execute a more strategic, efficient, and streamlined process that can improve new hire satisfaction, retention, and productivity. This is why it is an important technological investment and requires great foresight especially when talent is being prepared to take on the dynamic future of work. In order to drive engagement in the pre-joining phase, workflows that can auto assign 30-60-90 day structured onboarding journeys will play a fundamental role.
- Enabling career development with greater accessibility to skilling: Learning will continue to play a major role in the employee life-cycle. Ensuring that this process is carried out efficiently at the very beginning will showcase to your new recruit how much the company cares about their career development. This will also motivate them to become more engaged with their professional journeys within the workplace, enabling learning in the flow of work.
- Continuous coaching to support their integration into the company: Coaching is becoming a significant part of the company culture across industries to ensure the wellbeing and engagement of your workforce. There is no doubt that coaching will be imperative to retain talent during the onboarding stage as well. Through in-person conversations and by leveraging technology to take feedback from different stakeholders will allow your employee to feel witnessed, guided and supported.
- Relying on analytics to track productivity of your new hire: In a highly automated world, data is an important resource to rely on. By tracking employee performance and feedback with customised management dashboards, organisations can hugely benefit because they not only gain key insights on employee readiness but can also zero in on the impact of their onboarding process. This can be done through the use of predictive analytics by keeping an eye on the potential of attrition.
Investing time and energy in building an engaging and impactful onboarding experience will yield fruitful results when it comes to talent retention. It will ensure that the hires you bring in are engaged and are integrated into the company culture while knowing that they have the support they need to steer their professional growth paths. These days, in an highly competitive candidate led talent market, what your potential recruits seek is an employer who cares and what businesses seek is a hire who can add value to the organisation and is in it for the long haul. This is where the power of onboarding comes in, it not only ensures that your new hires becomes productive in lesser time, it also gives them the guidance they need and re-affirms their needs and aspirations within the company they have stepped into.