Onboarding is a crucial step in any employee-employer relationship. It’s your new employees’ first impression of your company and this impression is long-lasting. Think about your last first date. Did they make a good or bad impression? How did that affect the rest of the relationship? 

Now, this isn’t a one-way street. A great onboarding process gets new hires to work faster, enables greater productivity, and earns a greater return for the company. Given the benefits (and downsides), optimizing onboarding processes should be a top priority. Yet, the numbers show this is not the case for most organizations. 

The Problem With Traditional Onboarding

Your onboarding processes, like any business process, must be efficient and systemized. These systems are supposedly designed to give the employee what they require to start off successfully. But, 88% of employees think their employer did a poor job with the onboarding process.

Where is the disconnect? 

While traditional onboarding processes are efficient, most lack personalization. Of course, every new hire needs to go through compliance, credentials, and general paperwork. But, that’s only scratching the surface. If you want recent hires to have a successful start in their new role, you must connect them to the right resources, skills, and people during onboarding.

How do you accomplish this level of personalization without sacrificing efficiency? 

Data. 

Big Business Trends: Personalization

Personalization is a hot topic in business these days. Many organizations have seen tremendous boosts in sales, customer experience, and productivity from personalization efforts in various areas. 

Marketers are using personalization to optimize conversions. Product developers are personalizing the user experience of software applications. Even HR leaders are leveraging personalization to maximize the outcomes of training programs.  

A successful personalization strategy relies on great data. Gaining this data is still not an easy task. The biggest challenges with personalization all revolve around data: gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and inaccurate data (38%).

What’s the lesson here? Leveraging the right tools that capture data and automatically organizes it for quick insights is critical to successfully implementing personalization in any aspect of business. 

Here’s Why You Want To Personalize You Onboarding Process

As we mentioned before, onboarding is your company’s only chance at a great first impression. Here are some specific benefits to personalizing the onboarding process: 

1. Improve employee retention 

According to Gallup, organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. Retaining top talent is vital for ongoing success in a tight labor market and rapidly changing digital economy. 

2. Reduce unnecessary costs

Personalizing the onboarding process minimizes costs without harming results. Using data, you can identify and prioritize the onboarding activities that individuals need for success. Over time, data can show you where can eliminate redundant or ineffective programs, realign activities, and increase spending towards the most effective programs.

3. Boost employee productivity 

Boost your employee productivity through personalized onboarding. 77% of employees who had a formal onboarding process hit their first performance goals. Giving employees the right tools and training during onboarding enables them to hit the ground running from day one. 

4. Accelerate the process

You want your new people to start contributing as quickly as possible. However, the average new hire has 54 activities to complete during their onboarding experience. Personalized onboarding connects employees with the resources and programs they require and cuts out unnecessary activities, accelerating the new hire process. 

How Can You Personalize Your Onboarding Process?

Now that you’re onboard with personalization (puns intended), let’s talk about how you can successfully use data to create personalized onboarding processes. While every company’s strategy will be unique, here are a few tips that will drive success: 

1. Capture data throughout the entire hiring process

Efficient data collection is the first step for any data-driven strategy. Start by capturing data around your existing workforce. Then collect data throughout the hiring process from application to interview  to onboarding. We recommend using an automated tool that captures and organizes this data for you, otherwise, you will be spending your valuable time sorting through spreadsheets. 

What types of data should you collect? 

You want to understand a person’s overall skill set which includes their hard and soft skills, proficiency, experiences, certificates, and education. We collectively call this skills data. 

2. Use insights from your data to develop or refine your onboarding plan 

Data alone is not very useful unless it is organized in a way that conveys actionable insights. Map your new employee’s skills data against the requirements of their role. Where are the gaps? What skills are a top priority? What are your new employees’ strengths?

It helps to have standardized roles and skill descriptions across your organization to easily match existing skills to your requirements. From there use data visualizations to give you immediate answers to the questions above.

From these insights, you can start to tailor the onboarding process to best serve your employee’s needs.

3. Measure results to optimize your programs for future hires

The biggest benefit of using dynamic data over static data is that you can measure progress over time and continue to refine your onboarding process for maximum results. As you collect and map skills data to create onboarding plans for each new hire, you begin to aggregate useful information over time.

Dynamic data can help you answer questions like what programs are redundant? What programs are most used? What skills do our candidates typically possess? What skills do our candidates require training in? And many more. 

4. Seek tools that make it easy to incorporate data into your hiring and onboarding processes

All of these tips require tools that allow you to automate the process of capturing, mapping, and measuring skills data. As we mentioned in Tip #2, we recommend selecting a tool that uses data visualizations to organize data for actionable insights. 

Data visualizations give you quick, clear answers that can be communicated universally. This is crucial in any integrated HR program, where there are often multiple decision-makers involved in your people strategies and processes. A tool that makes it easier to leverage data will empower managers to make stronger decisions around their people. 

Bottom-line: Seek a visual platform that connects your managers with the answers they need to optimize their onboarding process and make that great first impression that leads to lasting results.

As we move into the future of work, it’s time for your onboarding to get an upgrade. How will you personalize your onboarding process to improve efficiency, productivity, and put new employees in the best position for success in their new role?