According to Glassdoor, efficient onboarding can improve a company’s employee retention rate by 82%, if conducted correctly.
What’s more important to consider with the above statistic, is the domino effects that this has on a company and/or team. From finances to team morale, productivity and more, effective and optimised onboarding can truly serve as a lifesaver for the resources, morale and productivity of your team.
What are we Doing Wrong?
With employee turnover deemed to be both a major problem and threat to company success and prosperity, it’s with urgency that we begin to explore areas in which companies can invest better and smarter into areas that offer effective growth.
This can be done by going back to the start–with your company’s onboarding processes.
The statistics alone serve as a worthy shock factor:
- Only 12% of employees agree that their organisation has a decent onboarding process.
- This meant that a staggering 88% of employees in the surveys felt that their organisation did not have a good onboarding program.
- 60% of businesses don’t set any goals or milestones for their new hires.
- 35% of companies spend $0 on onboarding new hires.
The cost of it all?
According to Glassdoor, onboarding a new employee can setback a company by about $4,000, while it costs between $3,000-18,000 to fill a vacant position due to employee turnover.
This can, on average, be between 16-20% of an employee’s pay.
Doing this over and over again can not only pose a financial risk, but domino into exhausting many other resources within the company.
What can we Do Right?
CareerBuilder added that 93% of employers believe that a good onboarding experience is considered critical to influencing new employee’s decisions on staying with the company or not.
Additionally, the first 45 days of employment account for up to 20% of worker turnover.
With this in mind, we now acknowledge the cruciality of the 30, 60 or 90 day period when onboarding an employee.
So how can we begin to tackle this correctly, through a new, refreshed lens?
SEO for Hire has assisted numerous clients (both companies and agencies, both SMEs and Fortune 500s) in finding top SEO talent to help build-up their SEO teams. In doing so, we have identified and established our core message in the importance of correct onboarding processes – inclusive of that, the benefits that come to all parties involved.
For, you could be attracting and hiring A-player, top quality candidates; but that means nothing if they aren’t onboarded and managed properly. The new hire can only do so much and perform so much, at the hands of their managers and bosses, meaning there is a level of responsibility and accountability from the company’s side to ensure that the teammate has what they need in order to succeed.
With that in mind, SEO For Hire put together a free resource to assist companies looking to effectively grow their teams, retain talent and prepare teams in a healthy, functional and productive manner.
One of the biggest issues that many companies tend to get confused about is the crucial difference between ‘orientation’ and ‘onboarding’. Before we dive into a few tips to ensure your onboarding process is optimised, we first need to identify the true essence of what onboarding is, and its difference to orientation.
Many companies consider orientation as the onboarding process, however, this is not the case. Orientation simply refers to a short period whereby the company introduces the new hire to the teammates, clients, tech and software, and office (if any). Orientation is a part of the onboarding process; which aims to be a much longer and in-depth process of assisting the new hire in adjusting to the company culture, work expectations, understanding their responsibilities and more.
Onboarding usually takes 30 – 90 days, inclusive of the new hire having a work buddy or shadowing a teammate, regularly scheduled meetings to check-in with their progress, introductory emails to clients, and more.
Onboarding Green Flags
🟢 – Make sure that you’re organised prior to the new hire. Ensuring that you’ve crafted out a refined onboarding schedule prior to the new hire beginning ensures a more stress-free transition for both yourself and the new hire.
🟢 – You’re also creating a sense of discipline, accountability and an understanding of a set of expectations which the new hire can adhere to when starting.
🟢 – Prepare your new hire with whatever they need in order to have them feel fully settled in. This includes offering a tech stack with equipment, software, login details and any other items you deem necessary. It could be a bonus to include a welcome card with this – little things often go a long way.
🟢 – Have a work buddy dedicated to them. When doing so, ensure that the buddy has at least been with the company for 1-3 years. This will ensure that the new hire has someone to lean on who knows the core of the company’s mission and culture. Likewise, don’t partner them with someone too senior who they can’t yet relate to–you want someone in the middle who can lead them, but also manage their day-to-day more in-depth.
”Don’t undervalue building relationships… It becomes easier to have meaningful and tough conversations to grow.”
– Travis Tallent, VP of SEO at Brainlabs
Set goals and KPIs that (when done correctly) help:
👉 – Measure performance
👉 – Align strategy with actions
👉 – Facilitate decision
👉 – Motivate employees
👉 – Create accountability
👉 – Create a learning and positive self-reflective attitude
👉 – Identify potential opportunities and potential roadblocks
We offer an in-depth exploration, templates and prompts to help you with drafting your KPI and objective framework in our latest onboarding resource.
In addition to the aforementioned topics, we have created an easy-to-remember acronym that breaks down all the key criteria for a healthy onboarding process. The acronym, easily remembered as MICC HATS (🎙👒) stands for:
💪 – Meetings: with team and leadership
💪 – Introductions: to clients
💪 – Cultural Integration
💪 – Communication Lines
💪 – Handbook: Employee handbook
💪 – Acknowledging expectations
💪 – Targets and goals
💪 – SOPs
If you are interested in receiving more information on our latest resource on optimising your onboarding processes, we have a FREE resource now live on our channel: https://www.seoforhire.co/optimised-onboarding/
We hope you enjoyed this article and hope your (and your team) find Optimised Onboarding a helpful resource for your new hires!
About the Author
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Josh Peacock – Co-Founder SEO for Hire
I’ve been building SEO teams for over 2 years now. Working with 100’s of clients from global start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. My team and I have a passion for going above and beyond for our clients and our industry. If you enjoyed this article, please make sure to follow me on Linkedin. My DM’s are always open 🙂