Add value to the new employee experience with preboarding

After a long and complicated search, you’ve found the right candidate and they’ve accepted the offer. Your work here is done, right?

Wrong.

According to CareerBuilder, new hires are particularly concerned with how their new employer communicates with them. Yet, 40% of candidates say they’ve experienced a lack of communication between when they have accepted the job and their first day of work. Perhaps that’s because only 47% of employers say they have a formal process in place for communication and interactions between the time of hire and the start date.

Although a relatively new concept, preboarding is an incredibly valuable process. For one thing, it can help ensure your new allstar doesn’t back out at the last minute. And for another thing, it empowers them to arrive on their first day already engaged and informed, ready to hit the ground running. Research by IBM has shown that preboarding activities can increase first-year employee retention by as much as 80 percent. Involving current employees in onboarding also increases their engagement and their “ownership” of new hires.

Don’t confuse preboarding with the more traditional onboarding process. Preboarding begins and ends before the employee’s first day. It can include some of the same tasks as onboarding, such as completing required forms, sharing the employee handbook and login information to cloud-based platforms like email and network tools so they can poke around and get familiar in advance.

But it can also include more engaging and welcoming activities that reinforce your new hire’s decision to join your organization. For example, you can provide answers to common first-day questions, such as dress code, when to arrive, how to check in and other itinerary items, such as a welcome lunch with the team.

This is also a good time to introduce the new hire to the rest of the team. Receiving a warm welcome via email will help your team gel more quickly. Your new employee will already know a few names and a bit about the culture, and your existing team will be better prepared for the first face-to-face day. You can even assign your incoming team member a mentor and encourage them to connect before the big day.

You can use your applicant tracking system (ATS) to manage the preboarding process similarly to how you manage recruiting. You can set up automation to get new hires to complete paperwork, view orientation videos and so on through their personalized candidate page. This will also allow you to track participation and task completion over time.

If you need to raise your preboarding game, talk to us about what’s possible with our ATS or schedule a demo today.