Onboarding A New Employee

Hire Right Part VI – Onboarding A New Employee

Note: This is the sixth and final part of our Hire Right series, showing candidates and employers the process of finding the best employees.

Hiring Right means bringing a new employee into your organization successfully and seamlessly. 

Onboarding

We’ve learned together that there are several steps to ensuring you’ll hire the right people for your company’s culture, short-term goals, and long-term future. And there are steps within the steps that make the process of hiring detailed and precise.

It’s not difficult to overlook one of the steps – or the steps within the steps – and see your best-laid plans thrown off course. Using this series as a guide, you can build the company you want with people who share your vision or can help you establish a clearer one. Hopefully, you don’t need to refer to the Hire Right series too often, because you’re hiring employees who grow and thrive in your business and want to stay.

We’ll get to Part VI – the final entry – shortly, but first, let’s catch up on any of the previous posts you might have missed:

Hire Right Part I – Quitting Your Job The Right Way
Part II – Writing A Great Job Listing
Part III – Choosing Whom To Interview
Part IV – Conducting An Effective Job Interview
Part V – Making A Job Forever

Now, let’s get to the final topic in the series, but not the end of nurturing a new employee and integrating the new addition into a positive and seamless environment. Here are four steps for how to make the transition smooth for the incoming employee and for those who work there already.

Keep Current Employees In The Loop

If you’re hiring to replace someone who left, your employees are probably caught up in the upheaval to some degree. Don’t let them wonder, because a new coworker could have ramifications for their roles and daily activities. Let everyone know when you’ve made a new hire, when the person starts, what specific role he or she will be filling, where he or she will sit and how the first few days afterward might be different as you spend time training and aren’t available for other priorities.

This doesn’t necessarily apply to large companies with many departments, but in a smaller office it’s important that personnel changes are public.

Be Prepared

A new employee probably doesn’t expect to know everything about how the company operates on the first day of work. He or she does expect, however, to having the necessary tools, programs, and information to begin learning about the inner workings immediately.

Employee Meeting

Set up a workstation and a computer with all the files and programs needed to start the job, then spend time showing how they’re used. This includes email and phone numbers, paperwork, and a rough schedule for the first week or more.

Team building

Integrate Right Away

The first few days for a new employee can be stressful, awkward, and overwhelming, especially if there is little or no interaction with new coworkers. It’s easy to fix that! Give a tour of the office and schedule a lunch or a team-building activity in the afternoon of the first day or morning of the second. This ensures the new person will feel included right away, and it moves you toward your goals of an inclusive, cohesive environment and an engaging company atmosphere.

Train, Train, Train

Before you begin overloading a new employee with programs to learn and people to meet, make sure to have a conversation about goals and responsibilities for the job. This is covered in the interview, of course, but now that the new employee has arrived at the office, it’s important to revisit so there are no hanging questions or misunderstandings.

Then it’s time for training, which can be broken up over several days and interrupted by those team-building activities mentioned earlier. Set up the new employee with webinars, how-to videos on YouTube, and of course in-person training from company managers. Allow the hiree to go at his or her own pace for the first few days before establishing greater priorities.

Of course, a new employee must be attended to pretty diligently for about a month, and a plan for those first 30 days has to be in place either before the start date or shortly after.

There! We’ve done it! The series is complete and you’re well on your way to hiring 6-7 future Albert Einsteins. Maybe more. OK, it might not go that well, but I promise you’ll be in a better place if you follow the strategies in this post and within the six-part series.

Stay in touch! Let me know how your new employee(s) are fitting in and how your process for hiring has improved. Leave a comment below and tell me how this series is changing how you do business. Thanks for reading the Hire Right series!

Jul 24, 2020

Author: Ford Saeks, Business Growth Specialist, Keynote Speaker, Author and Consultant. Helping you find, attract, and keep your customers. Find out more about Ford

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *