Conventional employee onboarding can be a real headache.
Piles of forms and hours of data entry make the whole process slow and tedious. Then there are the inevitable mistakes that come from manually processing new hires.
The problem is that a poor employee onboarding process directly affects retention.
New hires that don’t have a positive onboarding experience are twice as likely to look for a new work opportunity shortly after arriving.
Luckily, onboarding has evolved.
There’s no longer need for piles of paperwork packages or stuffy, formal meet and greets. Slick onboarding processes mean your new employees can become productive much faster, without wasting hours on admin.
Read on to find out how you can streamline your hiring procedures. Check out these six revolutionary employee onboarding process examples that efficiently welcome new hires, instead of scaring them off with mountains of paperwork.
This comprehensive guide features a number of process examples that will help with your onboarding. To go right to the section that interests you most, click below:
6 Onboarding Process Examples To Model Your Hiring Process On
If you want happy employees from the get-go, you need to streamline your onboarding process.
Check out how these six firms use different internal resources to ease onboarding complexity and welcome new hires without stress.
1. Yves-Rocher’s Automated Employee Onboarding
Yves-Rocher is a global beauty product retailer with over 3,000 locations worldwide.
The large beauty vendor had been experiencing ongoing onboarding issues, due to the complexity of processing new hires across all of its different locations.
The manual onboarding process required each new team member to fill out several different forms, each customized depending on the employee’s location. Since the different branches altered their processes often, these forms changed regularly.
The disparity between the forms made onboarding a real headache for HR headquarters.
Not only that, but as forms needed to go from the local location to HR headquarters and back, paperwork was frequently missing and mistakes caused huge delays.
This often resulted in employees starting without having payroll set up.
Seeking to streamline onboarding to eliminate these processing problems, Yves-Rocher decided to try automated employee onboarding software.
The beauty retailer now uses frevvo for the employee onboarding process.
frevvo’s digital forms make the whole process faster, more accurate, and less confusing.
First, onboarding automation means forms are easily customized per location, making it simpler for HR to process them at the other end and change them when necessary.
For the new employee, all instructions are embedded within digital HR forms. New hires know exactly what to do at each stage of the onboarding process.
Thanks to auto-population of forms, new employees only have to fill out their data once and it’s automatically populated across all forms.
Auto-validation on digital forms checks that all data is correct, cutting out data entry errors and preventing delays where paperwork has to be sent back.
Since forms are digital, employees can fill in documentation remotely and send it to the HR headquarters online. No more snail mail, meaning fewer lost documents and more effective onboarding.
2. Mailchimp’s ‘No Work’ Onboarding Week
Email marketing software, Mailchimp, prepares its employees by dipping their toe in the water.
Rather than rushing new hires to jump straight in, Mailchimp introduces new employees slowly with a ‘no work’ week.
Having onboarded 275 people last year, Mailchimp is known for building a strong workplace culture from the outset.
According to Shauna Birkett, Mailchimp’s People Project Manager, this organizational culture is built on a foundation of listening. In line with their motto ‘Listen Hard, Change Fast’, employees are encouraged to do nothing but learn in the first week.
As Shauna puts it, “The goal of ‘doing nothing’ in their first week is to set them up for success in the weeks and months beyond.”
One of the biggest first week focuses is on settling into the team.
New employees take the Birkman Personality Test before arriving. This is shared with their direct team so that new colleagues know what sort of person the new team member is.
Using the information from the test, team members are encouraged to welcome new hires by decorating their desks on the first day.
As Shauna explains, “Before they even start, each person fills out a survey of their favorite snacks, colors, hobbies, etc., and their team uses this information to decorate their desks. It’s amazing to see a grown person’s face light up at the sight of their desk covered in pizza wrapping and streamers. Managers also write welcoming notes on postcards to put into their new hire’s swag bags. Once a new coworker starts, their manager and team take them out to lunch.”
New employees will also get a big bag of merchandise on the first day, as well as being assigned a ‘Chimpanion’ to show them around.
Throughout the rest of the week, new hires simply meet team leaders and co-founders while learning the product.
3. Valve’s New Hire Handbook
Game development company, Valve Corporation, onboard new employees with a little humor.
Recruiting input from their existing team, Valve’s existing employees designed a funny employee handbook to welcome new hires.
Setting the tone from the outset, Valve uses the handbook to set expectations and demonstrate the company culture from the very beginning.
While the handbook is full of good humor, it includes real, poignant information that employees would need when starting.
Rather than using a top-down approach, Valve crowdsourced the information from its own team, asking what they felt was crucial for new hires to know. This includes everything from how to pick projects to the peer review process.
While conventional employee handbooks tend to only cover immediate introductions, this handbook helps employees understand expectations over a much wider timescale.
This helps employees work out team and managerial expectations on the speed of growth.
4. PMMA’s Digital Onboarding
Offering senior services to residents of Kansas and Missouri, Presbyterian Manors of Mid-America (PMMA) hires over 1,200 people each year.
Due to stringent regulatory and compliance requirements, PMMA’s new hire package has ballooned to nearly 40 forms.
Previously, PMMA used manual data processing mechanisms to deal with these forms. This took hours and resulted in lots of mistakes, as well as complications in compliance reporting.
PMMA decided to speed up onboarding by digitizing manual processes with frevvo.
Now, new employees receive a customized link to their full employee onboarding package, which they can fill in prior to arrival at their new role.
Employees only have to fill in their information once, and all forms are automatically populated with this data. All information is automatically validated to prevent data entry errors.
Important HR forms, like W-4s and I-9s, are automatically generated using this data. This ensures HR staff don’t make mistakes when reentering data.
Thanks to seamless integration with M-Files and payroll software, all documents transfer electronically and update these systems with relevant information.
Onboarding is super quick and compliance reporting has never been easier.
5. Twitter’s ‘Yes to Desk’ New Hire Process
Social network, Twitter, tries to make the process from hiring to starting absolutely seamless.
This is done in two ways.
Firstly, there are 75 touchpoints between a new employee and their new team. This includes team members, managers, and the HR team.
By having so many touchpoints, Twitter aims to make each employee feel especially welcome. Particularly significant interactions include the first-day breakfast, where new hires eat with their manager, and their first-day lunch, where they eat with their new team members.
The second part of ‘Yes to Desk’ relates to preparing all the equipment that a new hire would need. There’s nothing worse than starting a new job, only to find that your laptop hasn’t arrived or your uniform is on hold.
Twitter makes sure that all equipment, accounts, documentation, and expectations are ready for employees on their first day. As soon as a new hire walks through the door, they can log in and get started.
Another unique aspect of Twitter’s great onboarding program is its ongoing nature.
Twitter’s onboarding program doesn’t just stop after the first week. New hires will attend 30-minute presentations every Friday afternoon, where project leaders and managers provide further training.
6. Cajon Valley Union School District’s Employee Onboarding Workflow
Cajon Valley Union School District found that its employee orientation process was lengthy for both the HR team and new hires.
HR would complete everything manually, scanning in hard copies or entering data by hand. The process was tedious and error-ridden.
Keen to speed up the process and improve accuracy, Cajon Valley Union School District decided to switch to an automated employee onboarding workflow.
Having implemented frevvo, the HR manager now has a much easier job.
Now, the HR manager sends a customized set of ADA-Accessible web forms to new employees who can fill out all documentation remotely.
The automated workflow sends personalized onboarding emails to new employees with a link to a customized digital package where they can fill in all employment, payroll, and tax information.
This package also includes a personalized Confidentiality Agreement, PDF Mapping to I-9 and W-4 forms, and a pre-populated Physician’s Certificate that employees can print or forward to their physician for a signature.
Once completed, all data automatically transfers to the personnel database, payroll systems, and staff management portal.
For the HR department, the whole process is far slicker and mistakes have been practically eliminated.
How to Improve Onboarding
To encourage staff retention from the outset, you need your employee onboarding process to run smoothly.
If you want to streamline your onboarding processes, speed is your first hurdle.
The problem is that new employee onboarding processes often involve piles of human resources (HR) paperwork and hours of form filling.
Not only that, but constant mistakes and in-person approvals processes slow the whole chain down even further.
That means manual data entry, copious amounts of forms, and in-person authorization need to go.
Forward-thinking companies achieve this through digitization and automation. With automated employee onboarding software, like frevvo, everything is faster.
For example, by using digital forms that auto-populate, employees don’t need to keep entering the same information over and over.
Likewise, there’s no need for physical signatures, so approval processes are far quicker.
The second pressing issue is complexity.
There’s so much to get through that new hires tend to find it hard to navigate what they’re supposed to be doing. In fact, a fifth of employees complain about being confused on how to proceed during onboarding processes.
Automated employee onboarding software is one way to tackle onboarding complexity.
It removes the need for so much paperwork and organizes the onboarding process steps in an easy-to-follow manner. That way both new hires and HR staff know what to do and when.
Plus, responsive digital onboarding forms make the remote onboarding process far more accessible. New employees can complete the process from any device at any location and HR staff can approve the documents remotely.
Conclusion
Employee onboarding doesn’t need to be a drag. Follow these creative onboarding examples to welcome new employees into your company culture without overburdening them.
Why not try digitizing your employee onboarding workflows?
In today’s world of remote workers and online communications, digital onboarding streamlines the whole process for globally dispersed teams. New hires can onboard in no time at all from anywhere in the world, straight from their smart devices.
If you’re looking for more efficient employee onboarding processes, try frevvo’s employee onboarding workflow software free for 30 days.
