Poor onboarding processes aren’t just expensive. They kill the employer-employee relationship right from the start.
Not only are your outdated manual onboarding processes slowing you down and costing you money, they’re losing you top talent.
Streamlined onboarding leads to happier staff who stay longer, perform better, and speak more highly of your organization.
On top of that, you cut costs, speed up processing, and eliminate errors.
Onboarding automation is the most effective way to achieve the streamlined hiring environment that brings all these benefits and more.
Read on to find out the best ways to implement onboarding automation to streamline your HR department’s hiring process.
To jump straight to the tactics that are most relevant to your company, click below:
What is Onboarding Automation?
While a third of senior HR and People leaders claim they’re trying to create better candidate experiences for new employees, only 12% of employees strongly agree that their company does a great job of onboarding.
This is likely because their manual onboarding processes are slow and clunky.
Onboarding automation refers to the act of automating processes concerned with bringing a new hire on to the team.
Onboarding automation can streamline a world of onboarding activities, including:
- New hire data collection
- Customized form generation (e.g. W-4 and I-9)
- Equipment/uniform orders
- Induction course materials
- Benefit enrollment
Conventionally, onboarding practices and paperwork are done using manual paper and data entry processes. Onboarding automation streamlines this process to remedy the issues involved with manual processing.
Whereas manual processing is slow, expensive, and error-ridden, employee onboarding automation software like frevvo automates data capture, information transfer, and approvals to reduce or eliminate these problems.
Plus, using cloud-based technology, automated onboarding software makes onboarding remote employees far easier. You can onboard employees from anywhere without the need for manual paper trails.
Just look at Cajon Valley School District.
Previously, their onboarding mechanisms took a long time for both new hires and the Human Resources (HR) department. There were reams of manual paperwork, which were uploaded to the system by manual data entry and scanners.
Not only was this slow, the whole process was extremely error-prone.
Now, Cajon Valley School District uses frevvo’s automated employee onboarding software.
Customized forms are sent in a personalized email so new employees can fill out employment, tax, and payroll information online. All I-9 and W-4 forms are generated automatically, along with a confidentiality agreement.
There’s no more manual data entry — data is uploaded automatically.
The whole process is far faster and errors are practically non-existent.
Despite the obvious benefits of onboarding automation, 39% of businesses don’t automate any part of their onboarding process. In fact, only 2% of companies have automated more than 75% of their onboarding process.
Get ahead of the game and make your life easier by automating your onboarding.
5 Ways to Improve the Hiring Process with Onboarding Automation
Onboarding automation speeds up end-to-end processing during hiring. Not only that, but it reduces manual data entry errors and costs associated with those errors.
Looking for ways to inject automation into your hiring processes? Try these.
1. Automatically Generate New Hire Forms
Onboarding automation can make the hiring process easier from the very beginning.
For HR professionals, excessive paperwork is one of their biggest challenges.
Most often, the employee onboarding process requires new hires to fill in lots of forms. HR departments will need to create and customize these forms for each new hire.
This is an extremely tedious process for both the new employee and the HR department.
Using frevvo, HR teams can automatically generate new hire forms from templates and customize them to their exact needs.
Not only is this faster and simpler, it saves a lot of money in staffing costs. In fact, companies with top onboarding programs are 1.6x more likely to have a lower cost per hire.
Just look at Presbyterian Manors of Mid-America’s (PMMA) onboarding program.
The care services organization hires over 1,200 people each year.
Previously, each new hire received an onboarding packet with more than 40 forms and documents. That’s a lot of paperwork.
Not only does this take an age to complete, the packets would take a very long time to create and customize for each employee.
Now, thanks to frevvo’s drag-and-drop dynamic form builder, HR staff can create customized new hire forms in far less time. The system will also automatically generate dynamic PDFs, such as a Federal W-4 and I-9 forms.
HR staff simply send a customized link to new employees who can fill in all the forms online.
Following this, all data is automatically uploaded in their M-Files EDM system, reducing data entry errors and speeding up the process.
2. Automate New Employee Data Collection
New hire packets can take a long time to complete.
Frequently, there are a stack of forms and new employees have to repeatedly fill out the same information on different forms.
Huge new hire packets can be confusing. Often employees don’t know which forms to fill out next or what information goes where. In fact, 22% of new employees admit that they’re unsure how to proceed through the onboarding process.
Worst still, manually filling in new hire documentation is a super slow process that’s prone to mistakes.
What’s more, these forms are given to new hires on their first day. This takes up a lot of their paid working hours.
That’s why 36% of organizations are investing in HR technology. They want to offer a better employee onboarding experience.
Onboarding automation software like frevvo will auto-populate the forms with new hire data. This means that the new hire only has to fill out their details once. This data is pulled across to populate all forms that require the same information.
As Gary McGuire, the VP of Information Systems at PMMA puts it, “[It] saves employees hours of valuable time.”
Likewise, since data is auto-populated, errors become a thing of the past.
Want to automate your HR processes to save time and energy?
Sign up for a 30-day free trial of frevvo’s simple, drag-and-drop HR workflow automation software.
3. Automatically Route Documentation
Documentation handovers pose another problem to HR departments during the onboarding process.
Usually, new hires will submit documentation by hand, via snail mail, or by email.
Documentation often gets lost or forgotten and sometimes it’s sent to the wrong place.
What’s more, new hire packets may contain forms that need to be passed along to other departments or organizations, such as uniform orders, equipment orders, or benefits enrollment forms.
These run the same risk of being lost, sent to the wrong place, or buried in a busy inbox.
This can significantly delay the onboarding process. Since, HR professionals say that time is the second most important factor when onboarding new employees, this poses a serious problem when trying to get an employee up and running.
Onboarding automation eliminates these delays — documentation is automatically routed electronically, according to pre-set rules.
So, once forms are submitted, they’re automatically sent to the department or organization that needs to complete the next step.
The recipient is automatically notified of the arrival of documentation. If they don’t do anything about it, frevvo sends an automatic reminder.
That way, all documentation arrives instantly and can be addressed without delay.
Just look at how beauty retailer Yves Rocher has benefitted from automatic routing.
Previously, onboarding relied on paper processes. Documentation was sent by snail mail to the HR headquarters.
Not only did this cause a long delay, often paperwork was lost.
Worst still, if the paperwork arrived with an error or the handwriting was difficult to read, it would need to be sent back by snail mail and the whole process would start again.
This meant new employees would end up working several weeks without payroll being processed.
frevvo’s automated employee onboarding software changed all that.
Thanks to the sophisticated custom workflow routing capabilities, HR finds it easy to change and customize forms to each employee’s location.
The system automatically validates each form’s contents to make sure there are no errors before automatically routing to the next step in the process.
Now uniforms are ordered automatically, payroll is processed on time, and onboarding takes a fraction of the time.
4. Automate Hiring Approvals
For some organizations, certain steps in the hiring process may need approvals.
For geographically-distributed organizations or those that work entirely remotely, the approvals process can be arduous.
If you’re sending documentation by snail mail, it’s a slow process. On top of that, documentation runs the risk of getting lost or delayed.
If you’re sending documentation by email, it’s likely to get buried, overlooked, or forgotten in a full inbox.
Even in organizations where the HR department is under the same roof, documentation often goes unnoticed.
This is because HR departments are extremely busy. 66% of organizations only have one person working in the HR department, while 97% of organizations have fewer than 5 people carrying the workload.
The result is that staff spend hours chasing down approvals instead of getting on with their real work.
With automated onboarding software, the approval process becomes a breeze.
Documentation is automatically routed to HR managers or department heads for approval as soon as it’s ready and the approver is notified immediately.
With frevvo, managers can approve HR documents in seconds with e-signatures from anywhere on a mobile device.
Just look at how much more efficient this has made OSRAM Sylvania.
Before, the lighting manufacturer struggled with seeking different types of approvals from various supervisors across multiple locations.
This was an especially pressing issue since some forms needed to be routed to the HR service center in Mexico, and snail mail simply wasn’t an option.
Thanks to frevvo, supervisors can now sign and approve documentation electronically from anywhere in the world.
Electronic routing means approvals are automatically routed to the right place, and approvers are notified and reminded of outstanding approvals.
Now, all approvals happen almost instantly and delayed approvals are a thing of the past.
5. Automate HR Recordkeeping
Not only will you need to upload, store, and manage all new hire records, you’ll need to keep these records updated.
While you may already have HR software to manage data, the likelihood is that you’re entering that data manually.
In fact, two-thirds of HR departments are not automated and don’t have a single system for records. Instead they’re switching between all kinds of manual record-keeping processes.
Not only does this make record-keeping slow, it’s often peppered with errors. Data gets missed and incorrect information gets entered.
Remedying these mistakes leads to extra costs in staff hours. Since 59% of HR leaders say that the pressure to manage costs is increasing within their organization, it seems unwise to waste money on continually rectifying avoidable mistakes.
Onboarding automation software like frevvo will integrate with your databases and record systems to store submitted new hire information automatically.
Since all data is automatically validated, there’s no incorrect or missing data. Plus, it’s a super quick process with no clunky data entry.
That’s why the OESJ Central School District switched to frevvo.
Previously, the entire employee onboarding process was done on paper. But with a team of just two people, the data entry became too much.
There were frequent typos when data was entered into the system and they’d often find duplicate entries had been submitted.
Now, with frevvo’s onboarding software, new hire data is automatically uploaded to the HR system. This means neither member of staff has to worry about data entry.
There’s no more duplicate data entered into the system, and typos and errors have been eliminated.
Conclusion
Onboarding automation doesn’t just speed up the hiring process. It provides an effective and supportive onboarding experience for new employees.
The result? Employees are more satisfied in their jobs, more prepared to excel in their new careers, and more likely to refer your organization to other top talent.
In this sense, not only does an automated onboarding process save you time and money, while eradicating delays and tedious manual processing. It also fosters an environment where new hires are dedicated to your organization from the get-go.
Don’t fall behind. For streamlined hiring processes, you need onboarding automation. Try frevvo for free today and see just how much more streamlined onboarding can be.
