Five benefits of digital onboarding

1. Warm welcomeMany businesses suffer because employee onboarding starts on the first day of employment, when it should begin the moment the offer is made. This is a critical time for collecting relevant information from your onboardee and relationship building. You’ll need to exchange offer letters and contracts and provide them with details of their role and more information about your company. As soon as the role has been offered, your business should think of them as an ‘employee’. And having new starters that are ready to work from day one has never been easier. Digital pre-boarding/onboarding programmes allow them to arrive feeling confident and comfortable. They will already have an insight into the company’s culture and values and will have learnt about the priority skills. Moving some of the traditional elements of induction online makes it flexible and accessible in advance plus it welcomes them into the culture before they even start.2. It saves time and moneyEven simple tasks such as completing and returning documents can have a large effect on HR resources. In a recent webonboarding survey, 69% of HR decision makers said they had to spend time chasing up successful candidates to return completed or missing documents. That’s time they could be spending adding value to your business. Traditional onboarding is a manual process that amplifies the potential for delays and inaccuracies. Research carried out by webonboarding shows that 58% of organisations still manually transfer this information into their HR and Payroll systems. Businesses can save a great deal of time and resource by automatically transferring onboardee details. 3. Part of the teamIt’s rare for ‘digital’ to be considered a more personal approach, but digital onboarding frees up more time in the process for the kind of face-to-face contact that helps new hires get up to speed faster.You can tailor communications with personal messages and give candidates control over some aspects of their onboarding, for example by allowing them to choose aspects of their training. Digital onboarding also helps reduce the time spent on paperwork on a new hire’s first day, freeing up time for more personal discussions about company culture, workflow, work-related responsibilities, team dynamics and the like.4. GDPR complianceIn the past, integrating new hires into a company needed a mix of phone calls, emails and paperwork which meant information would be chaotically scattered across different formats. It also meant that this information had to be manually processed and collated, creating a slow and cumbersome task which is prone to errors, inaccuracies and incomplete datasets. Within GDPR any requests for information, for example subject access requests, will need the information to be easily presented in a common electronic format which is an additional challenge with paper based systems.Webonboarding has been designed to provide HR managers with everything they need to ensure they are working towards GDPR compliance with a simple, fast and secure cloud-based approach to data management. From the moment a successful applicant is selected, the system starts to track and manage all of the information that needs to be exchanged between HR, hiring managers and onboardees. Automated processes minimize the risk of duplication, inaccuracy and user error as data is collected, collated and stored without any need for manual HR processes.5. Boost engagementOnboarding can be fun and engaging while still being informative. Good candidates are hard won. You already know you need to impress them at the interview and when they become an employee, but this often falls apart at the crucial onboarding stage in between. Indeed, research carried out by webonboarding found that 47% of HR decision makers said delays in issuing offers has meant they’d lost their preferred candidates. So, engaging with your candidate as soon as you’ve made the job offer is vital. In many cases, there’s a gap between recruitment and employment, when candidates have little or no contact with the company they’re joining. Bridging that gap, with a robust onboarding process, can help make the move from recruitment to employment a seamless and positive experience, for both the employee and the hiring organisation. Making use of digital technology is therefore a great time and cost saver because many tasks can be automated, saving time and resources and ensuring consistency and accuracy. Digital technology also enables anyone to see where onboardees are in real time throughout the process. HR professionals and candidates are reminded of tasks they need to complete or information they need to provide, without the need for constant chasing via email and telephone. Case study: Kinnerton goes digitalThe success of Kinnerton is based on the quality of their ‘nut free’ confectionery products and a popular range of character licences; including Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig and Transformers.As a growing company, with more than 1,000 employees across six sites, they were finding it increasingly challenging to effectively manage new hires using a traditional paper-based approach.Kinnerton’s HR Business Partner, Lisa Barker, said: “The recruitment process before was pretty horrendous. It was time consuming, it was lengthy and the end-user didn’t have a good experience at all.“We can now send out a contract to somebody on a Friday and have everything signed, completed and ready for them to start on a Monday morning. “Whether we’re recruiting somebody at director level, on the shopfloor or somewhere in-between – the whole process is significantly improved,” said Barker.The switch to webonboarding means the whole process is now managed via an online portal, allowing incoming employees to instantly access paperwork and to sign documents digitally.Simpler, faster hiring processWith no need to post out starter packs, it has significantly reduced the time it takes to bring new employees into the business. It also provides new hires with a simpler, faster and more engaging starter experience.Aleksandra Senkova, Kinnerton HR Assistant, said: “We were looking for a system that was easy to manage from both ends of the process – from creating offers and contracts to making it simple and easy for the new recruit.”The company estimate that it now takes less than 10 minutes to prepare and send all of the onboarding information that a new starter requires. The system allows the HR team to track and monitor the progress of the onboarding in real-time.You can watch the full case study video here.Webonboarding provides a smarter way to onboard new employees into your business - reducing admin time, boosting efficiency and improving employee engagement. Go to www.webonboarding.com for more information.

Five benefits of digital onboarding

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