Whether you’re a smaller organisation or a large enterprise, you can’t deliver your growth goals without effective onboarding tools. Let’s talk about the most important priorities for choosing an onboarding tool that best suits your organisation.
You don’t need reminding why onboarding matters.
(Do you? Organisations with good onboarding enjoy 62% greater new hire productivity, 50% faster time-to-proficiency and 42% lower turnover, as just a handful of stats…)
But as so often, knowing and doing are totally different things. Onboarding is simple in theory and much harder in practice. Whatever the size of your organisation.
If you’re a smaller business, you might still be using spreadsheets to recruit – which makes onboarding almost impossible as you grow. Or using a basic ATS without an integrated onboarding tool, so you’ve got some automation but not everywhere it counts.
If you’re a larger organisation, it’s common to butt up against limitations with your current ATS being clunky, inefficient and outdated. And the issues that roll-on from that, because your team haven’t had time to sit down and map out your onboarding strategy and processes in any consistent way.
In both cases, the upshot is this: you can’t deliver your growth goals without effective onboarding tools.
So… let’s talk about choosing onboarding software that works for you.
6 essential priorities for an effective onboarding tool
#1 – It’s integrated with your ATS
This one’s especially relevant for smaller organisations, who’re often using a hodgepodge of tools for recruiting that don’t slot together well.
If you’re still using spreadsheets, onboarding is usually one of your biggest pain points. Collaboration’s crap. Version control is a nightmare. Candidates fall through endless cracks.
And if you’ve transitioned towards a basic ATS (woo!), that’s unlikely to include employee onboarding software (boo!). You could consider a standalone onboarding tool but realistically, that’s far too expensive.
The moral of the story for smaller businesses: choose an ATS that’s the complete package, offering recruitment, reporting, and onboarding. It’ll save you heaps of time, effort, and money in the long run. Onboarding can be SMEs’ superpower, but you need the right employee onboarding software.
If you’re a larger enterprise, your current ATS likely already includes onboarding. That’s great. Make sure you also consider how easily your talent tech integrates with your wider HR software.
Depending on your size and tech stack, this can become complicated fast. If life’s hard back-end, it’ll cause problems front-end, where your recruiters, managers, and candidates feel it.
#2 – It’s flexible and configurable to how you work
Great employee onboarding comes as close to personalised as possible, balanced against your practical need for efficiency and repeatability.
That means the right onboarding tool should offer lots of configurable onboarding workflows, so you can easily deliver personalisation at scale. That can be as basic or as complex as you need.
Large enterprises might have different onboarding processes for different countries, departments, teams, and jobs, for instance. But smaller organisations might just want to tweak onboarding so senior hires experience a slightly different journey to junior hires.
Either way, your onboarding process will be better if you don’t wedge everyone into the same box. So look for onboarding software that supports flexibility.
#3 – It offers lots of automation and templates
Whatever the size of your organisation, the biggest problem that derails onboarding is inefficiency.
Onboarding is a major risk period for drop-outs. For example, Gartner found that 44% of 3600 candidates had backed out after accepting an offer. Ouch.
The slower your onboarding process, the higher the risk. But so often, the onboarding tools you’re stuck with (if you’re using anything) are clunky, afterthought add-ons that don’t handle volume or complexity well.
Look for onboarding employee software with lots of sensible automation, bulk actions, easy templates, and smart editors for everything you need to do. Wherever a task is repeatable, your onboarding tool should stop you manually repeating it. And make making changes easy and fast.
Great onboarding functionality was a major priority for Staffordshire County Council when they adopted new talent technology. Thanks to Tribepad, they reduced time-to-hire by 30% to only 32 days. And candidate satisfaction with the process rose to 8.5/10. Tasty.
Tribepad Onboarding has been key for us. It saves us a lot of time, especially with the enhanced checks you need for a local authority. The module is really straightforward and easy to configure.
#4 – It makes compliance safe and simple
Compliance is one of the least sexy bits of recruitment. But also one of the most essential, especially if you’re in highly regulated industries like healthcare or local government.
But lots of businesses accept slow, clumsy, repetitive compliance processes as the way things have to be. They don’t.
Good onboarding employee software should make compliance as simple and speedy as possible. So you don’t have to sacrifice candidate (and recruiter and manager) experience to keep your organisation safe.
One essential should be good in-built digital contract management, to make editing, sending, signing, and storing contracts simple and safe. Also, look for an onboarding tool that has robust integrations, so you can easily sync to any compliance checks partners you use.
When HCRG Care Group adopted Tribepad for their end-to-end recruitment and onboarding, they reduced time-in-compliance by a whopping 62%. Not bad, hey.
#5 – It puts candidates at the heart of the process
A great candidate experience is one of today’s most important recruitment priorities. There’s generally been great progress here, with many organisations committing to end ghosting, stop bias, and build fairer, faster, better application journeys.
But the candidate experience often falls off a cliff when it comes to onboarding. Especially if you’re handling huge candidate volumes.
The problem with that is, candidates only remember the weakest link. Your recruitment journey can be exceptional but if onboarding is crap, that’s what candidates will remember. And take into the start of their career with you (if they even start).
Whatever your size of organisation, look for an onboarding tool that puts candidates at the heart of the process. It should make candidates’ lives easier, faster, and clearer – all while reducing your workload too.
One great way to achieve that is with a candidate self-service portal, which centralises all candidates’ recruitment and onboarding info and tasks into one simple hub. Then candidates can review documents, check outstanding tasks instantly and check progress.
#6 – It makes speedy collaboration easy
Onboarding takes a village, whatever your size of organisation.
For larger enterprises, recruiters are probably liaising with HR, tens or hundreds of managers, L&D, IT, procurement, and so on. Lots of moving parts, doing lots of different things at different times. Lots of possible cracks.
Smaller organisations often only have one person handing recruitment – so you’ll need to play well with managers or you won’t have the bandwidth for onboarding at all. Let alone the bandwidth for consistently great onboarding.
The right onboarding tool should be designed with easy, fast collaboration at its heart. Look for stuff like at-a-glance progress summaries, automatic reminders to the right people at the right times and configurable collaboration workflows.
Make it easy for your people to pull together.
The right onboarding tool creates time and space
Having the right onboarding software is only part of the puzzle. The real point is, when you have the right onboarding tools, you free time and space for your team to start becoming more strategic – and more imaginative.
(More generally, if you’re from a smaller organisations that still uses spreadsheets, that’s also the major benefit of upgrading to an ATS).
Suddenly, you’ll find you have bandwidth to design an onboarding process that feels totally you. Space to add that sprinkle of personalised magic that candidates love and rave about. Time to give more support to new hires who need a little extra helping hand to feel safe and comfy before they start.
The right onboarding tool is a springboard for your team (whether that’s one person or thirty) to unlock their people skills – to bring happier, more engaged, more excited people into your tribe.
Tribepad is the trusted tech ally to smart(er) recruiters everywhere. With everything you need for great recruitment and onboarding, our talent acquisition software is a springboard for faster, fairer, better recruitment for everyone.
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