There’s a growing understanding in the staffing world that the key to success lies in an innovative, modernized employee onboarding process.
Bullhorn’s most recent Global Recruitment Insights and Data (GRID) report showed that 86 percent of staffers believe that embracing digital transformation is essential to remaining competitive. Legacy systems and processes need to be constantly refined, improved, modernized.
On the surface, this all seems like a no-brainer; of course your staffing processes should be modernized. And yet, the GRID report also showed that only one-fifth of staffers believe their organization has fully adopted staffing technology.
You would think that the widespread desire to be a modern staffing firm would imply widespread adoption of new technologies to support onboarding. But that’s clearly not the case. So what’s behind this discrepancy?
One answer is that there is a frustrating lack of clarity around what it really means to modernize your employee onboarding process. With the wide variety of available technologies out there, what tools will be genuinely useful and what constitutes “modern” is pretty vague.
In this article, we’ll dispel that vagueness and drill down into what it really means to have a modernized onboarding process.
Simply put: A modernized employee onboarding process is automated
Staffing is fundamentally about human beings — understanding them, assessing their strengths and preferences and connecting them in ways to provide a productive and satisfactory experience to both employer and employee. Machines can’t replicate this process, but they can support staffers in making it happen. Before that can happen, however, staffers need to make room for machines in their onboarding workflow.
Integrate to automate
Given the available technology today, staffing professional don’t need to carry out the employee onboarding process by switching through a dozen different tools, manually entering much of the same data each time and forcing their candidates to do the same.
Integrating these different tools through an onboarding platform is a prerequisite for automation. A workflow can only be automated up until the point that a human has to be involved in data entry. Once your tools are integrated, however, your process becomes capable of automated data verification, maintenance of employment records, audit-readiness, deadline tracking and more. A modernized workflow can easily handle straightforward but essential tasks such as these, freeing up time in your staffers’ days.
Build resiliency into your process
Automating the time-consuming, procedural tasks has additional benefits beyond giving your team time to treat candidates with the attention they deserve. It also makes your employee onboarding process more resilient.
Expertise is often distributed unevenly across any given staffing firm or HR department — and sometimes, expertise in a key part of the onboarding process exists in only one person. Say you come across a great-fit candidate. What if the one person on your team who fully understands the laws and regulations that apply when hiring in your industry is absent? Do you risk losing that candidate by holding off, or do you risk being out of compliance by moving ahead without consulting your expert?
The answer to that should be neither. It’s possible to bake these rules into your employee onboarding process so that whoever oversees onboarding — whether that’s a new trainee or a seasoned veteran — is equipped to carry out the process correctly and completely.
Look for a tailored solution
Using automation to create a faster, more efficient and more reliable employee onboarding process, unfortunately, is easier said than done. No two onboarding processes are alike, making it challenging to simply provide staffers with an off-the-shelf solution.
Even if such a solution were feasible, it would not be desirable — there will always be nuances particular to your organization that deserve particular attention if we’re to truly make an employee onboarding process that is as efficient as possible.
Thus, in any given automated onboarding solution, there needs to be an element of flexibility and adaptability. Every onboarding process has its quirks, and onboarding solutions need to be customizable to address them. That’s why we developed Xenqu to allow for the creation of dynamic workflows that fit individual needs. Talk to one of our experts about your onboarding process, and we’ll identify where and how you can benefit from an automated solution.
