HRM Five: Better onboarding strategies

First impressions can often be make or break. It’s a great idea to go all out during recruiting, but it would be a grave mistake to stop bothering about the employee once the ink has dried on their contract. If you want them to stick around and have a great, storied career with your company, you’ve got to think as early as the onboarding process.

Here are HRM Magazine Asia‘s tips for an onboarding process that will help maintain your recruits maintan the best impression of your organisation

1. Digitise

No one likes to come in to a new job – just to be tied up with forms and orientation videos. There’s no reason these can’t be uploaded to a dedicated onboarding server, which can then be shared with new recruits.

2. Gamify

Gamification is a fun and interactive way to make onboarding more fun and less boring.Some organisations even make a competition out of it, with prizes as simple as chocolate, or as exciting as shopping vouchers. There are lots of platforms out there for organisations to choose from.

3. Add a personal touch

Just having someone personally greet them upon arrival can help your new feel like they are being genuinely welcomed into the organisation.The buddy system is a great way to formalise this, and make sure that new employees have someone to give them a tour of the premises, introduce them to everyone in the office, and take them out to lunch.

4. Make it special

Consider sending, in advance, a gift basket of company swag. Something as simple as a company notebook and a nice pen, along with a personalised note from their new manager, can alleviate new job nerves, and also make your new talent excited to get started.Alternatively, why not have monthly gatherings to welcome new recruits, where they can mingle with their new colleagues over snacks and drinks? Friday late afternoons are great for this.

5. Help them get started ASAP

All the fancy bells and whistles won’t mean anything if a new employee turns up and doesn’t even have a computer to use. If you know in advance that a new starter’s first day is coming up, there’s no reason not to get IT to begin setting up their emails accounts and logins.Managers should also be trained to have the right mindset – as soon as the ink has been dried on the contract, they should already be incorporating the new hire into their ongoing and future plans.

Yamini Chinnuswamy offers five important points on everything you wanted to know about HR practices today, but were too afraid to ask. Check out previous editions of HRM Five here.