First impressions: Integrate new hires before they start work

As firms relentlessly seek ways to increase revenues and productivity, their attention will turn to talent management. One area that many overlook in this effort is the onboarding process for new hires. Research suggests that US and UK employees have cost businesses US$37bn a year through poor understanding of their roles – and
much of this comes back to poor onboarding.¹

Making the most of the talent you employ starts with your firm’s brand, which links to its reputation as an employer. If you have a strong reputation and a positive employer brand, then you will be more likely to attract not only better talent but also the ‘right’ kind of talent that resonates with your firm’s:

1. purpose (why it exists);

2. ambition (what it wants to achieve);

3. strategy (its plan to get there); and

4. brand positioning (what it promises clients and staff, and why this promise matters).

If these things are disconnected – from the recruitment process to signing the contract to the time between the new hire leaving his old firm and joining yours – there will be a gap that can be very difficult to close later.

Research has found that a strong employer brand can give you broader and deeper reach into the talent marketplace.² You will, as a result, pay less of a premium to attract that talent and, once they join, they are likely to perform better and
stay longer.

But, this all assumes that you get off on the right foot: 90 per cent of people decide whether they will stay with a firm within the first six months – and this is where the majority of turnover occurs in most organisations.

A study into workplace mobility found that 25 per cent of all employees leave within one year.³ In addition, 30 per cent of companies reported that it takes a year or more for employees to become fully productive. A good onboarding process reduces the risk of having to reinvest resources in talent replacement.

Your firm will never get a second chance to make a good first impression. More importantly, your approach to onboarding is a window into what your organisation really values. It is better to do things right than to do them quickly.

The benefits of a proper onboarding process include:

1. reduced management and colleague time spent on getting new hires up to speed;

2. saving time on completing a lot of the routine administrative and legal paperwork before new hires set foot in the office; and

3. reassuring candidates that they have made the right choice by clearly demonstrating how much you value them as new joiners.

There are three things that you can do
to get more from your onboarding of
new starters:

1. use the time before they join;

2. make the onboarding experience more impactful; and

3. understand that onboarding should last at least 90 days.

Before they join

Typically, more senior hires will need to work out their notice period or gardening leave. So it is entirely possible that, between the final interview and your sending out the new starter pack, contract and so on, that a period of
three months could pass before they
walk in the front door.

This is a great opportunity to get started with the onboarding process.
You can and should use this time effectively to:

1. complete some of the necessary but routine administration and form filling;

2. begin the process of helping new hires to experience your brand and culture and meet their new colleagues;

3. complete some of the more routine elements of onboarding, so that their face-to-face session(s) can be focused on more value-added activities.

Things to consider handling during the period between contract agreement and day one at work, where appropriate, include:

• written communication of your code
  of conduct and/or firm values;

• banking and payroll details and employee benefits enrolment materials;

• inviting them to join your social media sites and groups, such as in LinkedIn;

• contact information and social calendar of firm/team events that they can attend to start getting to know their colleagues;

• background reading and documentation about your firm, its leadership and the practice groups they are joining; and

• office information and directories,
  so that key contact information can
  be stored before they join.

The Coca-Cola Company (Europe) has a secure website that does these things and more – new hires can log in securely and complete some routine admin and get to connect with their new company and colleagues while they wait for their start date. This ensures that candidates are ‘kept warm’ and reassured that they have made the right career decision.

Some professional services firms also produce newsletters for the talent marketplace as a way of staying fresh
in the minds of the ‘passive’ job market of those not actively seeking employment; these could be incorporated as well.

A particularly savvy firm might
develop a new joiner app for mobile
devices – that way, new hires can be ‘pushed’ news and information, in
addition to using the features listed
above to connect with your firm.

Impactful experience

Many organisations have realised that onboarding can and should be a significant investment in the future productivity, engagement and retention of their talent.

So, rather than spending a day in a stuffy, lightless room and seven PowerPoint presentations from leaders, HR, facilities management, risk and compliance, they create a more interactive experience that truly reflects what their brands stand for. This can include hosting the meeting off site over several days and ensuring that new joiners have the opportunity to meet and mingle with a good cross-section of senior partners and new starters.

If you have done some of these activities before new hires join your firm, even if it is only a day’s event, you should be able to make it less administrative and operational and more inspirational and interactive. They will have done a lot of the ‘care and feeding of new employees’ activities before they step through the doors on day one.

Brand value

While practices are evolving, it is still
often the case that new starters get a
one or two-day induction and then are
sent off to their new world of work with never a backward glance. Best practice suggests that this sub-optimises the onboarding opportunity (see box:
Getting onboarding right).

 

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Getting onboarding right

• Ensure managers have a first week, first month and first 90-days plan of check-in meetings and activities planned for each new starter. These can and should be both formal and informal and involve others in the team.

• Connect new starters so that they can have a network among themselves. Often, graduate-entry classes create a social media page – this should be encouraged internally as well. Your new starters can use this to network and build relationships across the firm, which will drive better cross-practice understanding and communication, help to highlight diversity and share different perspectives, and bring social and cultural benefits.

• Help each new starter to select and get a mentor within the firm – this can make a massive difference in the first six months. The mentor does not need (and probably shouldn’t) have a reporting-line relationship to the new starter, but can act as an advisor, sounding board and advocate to smooth over some of the inevitable frictions that a new starter in any new organisation is likely to encounter. Getting this right can help to ensure that good people don’t leave for the wrong reasons. That can often be managed if the right conversations are started early in the process.

• Create a buddy system. Even with senior/lateral hires, it’s always nice to have someone else to share thinking with. A buddy system can work for lateral hires of any level of experience.

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While many of these ideas will not
be new for some firms, onboarding is
often the poor relation of both talent attraction efforts and talent management and engagement efforts. Attention to what
might seem like small things can pay significant benefits.

If you think about your organisation in terms of its brand – its reputation – as a professional services firm, your people are your brand. Making sure that you find the right people and, as importantly getting them off to the right start, is a wise investment that should drive higher engagement, lower staff turnover, longer retention, greater productivity and enhanced advocacy for your business – even after they leave your firm.

Kevin Keohane is managing director
of BrandPie Creative Strategists
(www.brandpie.com) and author of
Brand & Talent.

Endnotes

1. See $37 Billion: Counting the Cost of Employee Misunderstanding, Cognisco, June 2008

2. See ‘An employer brand predictive model for talent attraction and retention,’ A. Botha, Mark Bussin and L. De Swardt, SA Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 9 Issue 1, 2011

3. See 2012 Allied Workforce Mobility Survey: Onboarding and Retention, Allied HR IQ, May 2012

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