Every company is aware of the high costs of employee turnover. Statistics abound, but everyone knows that investing in a new hire and losing them within the first year is extremely expensive. However, there are ways you can improve the recruitment and onboarding process so as to reduce new hire turnover.

Companies can create proactive plans and enact strategies to ensure their new recruits hit the ground running. These are predicated on the support of existing team members, so that the company demonstrates a clear interest in the new hire’s success. 

Here’s how you can improve the onboarding process to give your new team members that best chance of success with their new environment.

1. Leverage Your Internal Experts

Every company has them. Every company employs individuals whose experience, knowledge, and know-how empower them to solve multiple company-wide problems. Some are engineers. Some are seasoned sales professionals, highly-trained technicians, managers, tradespeople, or supervisors.

Regardless of their position or what they do, these subject matter experts can impart knowledge and expertise to new hires. They can create tailor-made plans to help new hires get acclimated. They can create training modules or train new hires one-on-one. Leveraging these subject matter experts properly ensures that new hires glean critical information about the company’s products and services.

Don’t make the all-too-common mistake of monopolizing the time of your experts. This is not a question of having them spend days on end training new hires. Instead, create separate modules and training sessions where new hires have plenty of time to learn new skills and understand how things work. This gives new hires time to learn, create follow-up questions, and review previously discussed training sessions.

Many companies struggle with challenges associated with recruiting en masse and having the right strategies for successful training and onboarding is crucial. By establishing tailored induction plans borne out of effective recruitment practices, businesses have a greater opportunity to seamlessly integrate their large-scale inflow of new recruits into existing teams. It's not just about filling positions, but ensuring these hires become integral parts of their respective units efficiently. To streamline this process further, learn more about high volume hiring and its best practices.

2. Use Milestones and Goal-Setting

Companies with poor onboarding processes typically leave new hires on their own. This is the sink-or-swim mentality where recruits are left to fend for themselves in a new, possibly challenging environment where they feel overwhelmed. These businesses believe it’s the best way to build character and get new hires to create their own opportunities. In most cases, it doesn’t work.

These archaic and outdated processes are typically found in less-than-ideal company cultures. They foster an us-versus-them or you’re-on-your-own mentality. Don’t make this mistake. Use milestones and goals for new hires and their training sessions.

Sharing these milestones with new hires and defining a plan for success clearly demonstrates your company’s investment. It shows how important you view that new hire and how critical it is for them to adhere to the milestones. It also allows them to see just how far they have progressed in tangible, measurable terms. Up to 60 percent of companies fail to use milestones and goal-setting with new hires. Don’t be one of those companies.

3. Post-Onboarding Resources

While new team members may feel a surge of confidence once they overcome the hurdle of the onboarding process, as a business, there are a few things you can do to help integrate them into the team and provide a stable environment for growth. 

• Invest in continued learning opportunities for team members, including providing an onboarding video to facilitate the integration of new hires.
• Remind team members to cancel unneeded subscriptions the business can provide as a tool or work resource. 
• Pair new team members with mentors to help them climitize to their new roles. 

4. Periodic Reviews and Scheduled Assessments

According to a recent Gallup Report, it can take new hires to take anywhere from six months to one year before they’re completely self-sufficient. However, this doesn’t mean that time can’t be improved. It most certainly can.

The previous tip discussed using goal-setting and milestones. This tip refers to setting up separate reviews and assessments on the new hire’s performance and ability to grasp important company procedures, processes, and approaches.

These periodic reviews and scheduled assessments must never be confrontational. The goal is to have an open discussion where a free exchange of ideas can be discussed and reviewed. This is where you and the new hire discuss what’s working, what isn’t, what needs to be changed, and how best to move forward.

The periodic reviews can be done at any time. Simply taking the time to check in with the new hire helps. It can be done every other day or once a week. Set aside 15 minutes and welcome feedback. It allows the new hire to share how they feel about their progress.

Your scheduled assessments are pre-determined periods that the new hire plans for. During these assessments, management and the new employee can review how successful the new hire was at attaining goals, objectives, and milestones. Afterward, the personalized onboarding and training processes can be adjusted. You may choose to speed up the process or have the employee retrain for a given process.

5. Encourage Initiative

Don’t make the onboarding process too rigid. Encourage initiative with the new hire. Allow them to take on new challenges. While training new hires is important, sometimes the best lessons are learned from mistakes, and that’s OK.

While you want an all-encompassing plan with specific goals, objectives, and milestones, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t allow for some flexibility in that plan. Onboarding is a fluid process. It changes according to how well the new hire picks up new information. If that new hire is stuck, then the goals, objectives, and milestones may need to be tweaked somewhat.

The most important aspect of your onboarding process must be personalized to the new hire. Understanding their strengths and weaknesses will allow you to focus on more pressing issues that the new hire may need time to understand. Giving them a chance to make mistakes and learn shows your confidence in them as new employees.

6. Use an Internal Talent Marketplace

Not every company can afford an internal talent marketplace; not every company needs one. An internal talent marketplace is a repository of your company’s knowledge and employees' skills, expertise, know-how, education, and competency levels.

These marketplaces help with onboarding by providing insight into the hidden talent of existing employees. They close the company’s talent gap and allow them to fill positions with existing resources strategically. They can also be used for training or upgrading talent.

Create an intranet hub or forum if your company can’t afford an internal talent marketplace. This resource is fantastic for retaining, storing, and using company and employee data. Processes, procedures, and training modules can be stored in this hub.

Your intranet forum is also a place where employees can exchange ideas, post articles, ask questions, solve problems, and create cross-functional project teams to solve company-wide or department problems. This is also a place where your new hire’s onboarding plan can be stored, updated, and reviewed.

7. Personalization is Essential 

Adopting a one-size-fits-all or cookie-cutter approach to onboarding rarely, if ever, works. The plan for each recruit should ideally be personalized. It must be tailored to the position the new hire is filling and to their skills, competencies, and knowledge.

Some new hires will easily speed through the onboarding process, while others will require more time. Neither indicates how successful the new hire will be, so ensure your process is personalized and customized for each new employee.