What’s the key to an optimal onboarding experience?
You’ve probably got some ideas yourself, but your ideas will be different than the next staffers’, and the next one’s. the truth is, no two organizations’ onboarding process are alike. Thus, there’s no simple, one-size-fits-all solution. You have to figure out where your gaps are — whether that’s in doing a better job of sourcing high-quality candidates, reducing your time-to-start or improving auditability — and tune your process to address the specific aspects of your process that created those gaps.
There may be no single way to deliver a better onboarding experience, but using the best onboarding software can help provide the structure you need to get started. The trick is to select a software that solves for staffers’ industry-wide needs while remaining flexible enough for you to implement at your own organization.
Broadly, there are four capabilities you should look out for in the best onboarding software. If you pick a tool that meets these criteria, you’ll have no problem plugging any gaps in your onboarding process, no matter where they’re found.
1. Remote ready
The way that people work and interact with one another is constantly changing, and the way that staffers interact with their candidates needs to adapt. To meet candidates where and how they prefer, you’ll need to identify an onboarding software with two capabilities:
Remote I-9 and E-Verify facilitation
Remote work has steadily become more popular over the last few years, followed by a huge surge in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the surge in remote work has come a surge in remote hiring, which can be a delicate process.
Getting remote I-9s right every time is challenging, but necessary. Any onboarding software must provide support for this process and meet all compliance requirements consistently. Human staffers can be prone to errors, exposing your organization to fines and penalties, but a software solution can keep track of changing rules and regulations and ensure that your organization is in compliance every time. This also frees up your staffers to do their actual jobs — connecting with candidates and making great placements.
Mobile capabilities
Without your candidate’s physical presence, you can’t control how they access onboarding documentation. Meanwhile, ninety-six percent of Americans own smartphones, with a full one-fifth who rely entirely on their smartphone for internet access. With the increasing adoption of and reliance on smartphones, there’s no reason to frustrate candidates that prefer to use their smartphone or exclude those who rely on it entirely for internet access. Doing so simply shrinks your candidate pool, making it more likely that you’ll miss great-fit candidates.
2. Designed with communication in mind
A flexible and robust communication capability is particularly crucial when hiring remote workers, but it also helps reduce friction in the onboarding process no matter where your workers are.
Without a dedicated tool to act as a central source of communication, you’ll run the risk of overwhelming your candidates with a small army of HR professionals asking for different requirements through different portals. This isn’t just frustrating for the candidate; it also slows down the onboarding process and increases the chances that documentation gets filled out incorrectly.
The best onboarding software will offer several options for you to communicate with your candidates to ensure flexibility for a given industry or candidate circumstance. You’ll want a tool that supports real-time communication via email, instant messaging or text; robocalling when appropriate; and automated communicate workflows.
If you demonstrate to your candidates that you’re always available for communication, they’ll be more likely and able to reach out to you for assistance during any difficult or confusing step in the onboarding process, ensuring that they can get hired with as little friction and delay as possible.
3. Integrable into your current workflow
Staffing professionals looking to incorporate an onboarding software into their process may be unhappy with certain elements of their workflow, but other elements are likely to work just fine — you shouldn’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water when adopting a new tool. That’s why integrability is a key feature to look out for in any onboarding software.
The system should be designed with integration top of mind, with an open API that makes it easy to work with common systems like Bullhorn, ADP, background checks and the other tools that staffers rely on. Not only will this mean that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but if your onboarding software possesses automation capabilities, integrating all of your tools to one central hub will enable serious efficiencies.
4. Fully modernized
The staffing industry has changed dramatically over the years, but not all staffers are taking advantage of the opportunities that modern technology has to offer. According to Bullhorn’s Global Recruitment Insights and Data (GRID) survey, only a fifth of staffing professionals believe they have completely adopted technology into their work.
Implementing an onboarding software at your organization is certainly a step towards technology adoption, but not all tools serve to modernize your workplace. In fact, the wrong solution can box staffers into a workflow that puts more demands on their time and forces them into performing tasks that ought to be automated.
It’s important to keep in mind that just because much of the work that staffers do can be automated doesn’t mean you won’t still need staffers — the recruiting industry is a uniquely human one that requires empathy from its professionals, and that’s something that a tool can’t deliver.
What the right tool can do, however, is to automate the procedural tasks that would otherwise distract a staffer from carrying out the uniquely human elements of their jobs. Onboarding software should automatically ensure that you’re in compliance, automatically send routine communications and alerts to candidates and staffers and enable the onboarding process to keep running, even if there’s an emergency or an edge case. Modern technology should be as hands-off as possible; onboarding software is no different.
Finding a flexible solution
An onboarding software with these four capabilities will be flexible enough to adapt to your organization’s needs while remaining robust enough to be a true value-add. Some businesses will have more or less of a need to accommodate remote workers, or more or less of a need to link together disparate tools. All staffing organizations, however, stand to benefit from a software solution that supports their efforts when addressing these needs.
We’ve thought hard about what staffers need to help deliver their candidates the best experience possible. That’s why we developed our onboarding software, Xenqu, to provide these capabilities and more. If you’d like to talk over whether Xenqu can support your organization’s onboarding process, get in touch with one of our experts. We’re always happy to chat.
