Looking for the best candidates for your company’s job positions isn’t the most crucial part of building your productive team. It’s only one of the processes that you need to do for you to be able to gather the right set of talented people, while making sure you can keep them for a long time. The most critical part of ensuring that your hired talents will be productive is the new employee onboarding process.

Onboarding new staff is the process of orienting a newly hired employee about your company, its culture, and the tools and information needed for them to be a productive new staff member. This can last up to 12 months and may involve numerous paperwork and routine tasks that must be complied with both by the new hires and the HR department. This needs to be done strategically to ensure that the new hire has higher retention in your company while staying on the right track.

However, even with this fact, some companies find it hard to go through this orientation properly. They tend to make the onboarding process as short as possible so the new hire can get right to work quickly. Thus, new hires couldn’t last more than three months due to informal onboarding. A newly hired staff tend to get discouraged when they don’t fully understand their job.

While proper onboarding and training are essential, it doesn’t have to be too consuming. To help you out, here are five tips for onboarding new staff successfully:

1.Test Your Newly Hired Employees

The first thing you may need to do is to get to know your new hires. Comprehending their strengths and weaknesses will help you determine which area should you focus on teaching them. If you’ve hired a massive number of new employees, this may be time consuming, especially if paper works were done individually.

To save you some time while still going for formal onboarding, you can use a paperless employee onboarding software to send them documents about the job position and questionnaires about their skills. This will make the process easier and more systematic, not only for you but for the new hires, too.

Once you’ve gathered helpful information about their abilities, you can then train them on the skills they need to catch up on in order to be an efficient addition to your company. This customized plan will also be useful as you can create training platforms that would fit every employee’s specific needs.

2.Be More Engaging With Them

The end of the onboarding process isn’t a sign that their training has also ended. Training and development are ongoing processes even if you’ve been in a company for many years. Thus, make sure that your new hires know this by maintaining communication and engagement with them during and after the onboarding process. Keep them on board by telling them about the company’s development plans, letting them voice their ideas, and being proactive during planning.

The more they feel involved, the more they feel like they serve a purpose, and choose to take on the job and the company seriously.

3.Assign A Mentor

Understandably, new hires tend to be intimidated when raising questions to their managers, especially if they think their questions are insignificant and unnecessary. When questions aren’t voiced out and addressed properly, this could result in mistakes and wrong assumptions about specific jobs.

To help your new hires be more open during their onboarding, assign them to their own mentors. Mentors can be employees who’ve been in the company longer and have expertise in the same job at hand. This way, new hires can address their questions quickly to their mentors and close the gaps in their knowledge.

4.Utilize Job Shadowing

You can also let your new hires job-shadow their mentors so they can have a first-hand look at what their daily jobs really look like. This way, your new hires won’t be assigned their own tables without any prior knowledge about what to do or how to start. Job shadowing their mentors will help them have a slow but steady transition. This is also their opportunity to ask questions whenever specific job processes will confuse them.

5.Provide Constructive Feedback

Even if you’ve assigned your new hires to their mentors, you must still keep on monitoring their progress regularly. Rather than waiting to assess them after training or after a few months or a year, it’s best to regularly provide them with constructive feedback to know which areas should they continuously improve on during the onboarding. This will also allow you to tweak their training process as early as possible for the particular areas on which you think they need to improve more.

The Bottom Line

By following the tips above, you can assure that the time spent in onboarding your new staff will be reduced, but still remain effective at the same time. A successful onboarding process won’t only ensure an efficient employee in the future, but this will also guarantee that your new hires will stay longer in your company for good. Always remember to keep their first day at work engaging and memorable, and they’ll surely be coming to work as excited as their first day.

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