Getting your new hires onboarded fast is crucial for your company to grow and for your new team members to settle in well.
A successful onboarding process helps them to get to know the team, the company, and the culture so that they feel welcome and can be productive as soon as possible. Ideally, your onboarding process transforms promising talent into top-performing employees.
At Audvice, we’ve been hiring and onboarding many new talents, which led us to discover some effective hacks and best practices we want to share with you in this blog post.
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#1 Thoughtful recruiting
Hiring fast is good, but hiring the right people is better.
It all begins with the recruiting process. Consider your job description as the first briefing your new hire will get. Include all important information candidates need to know about the role, list all needed requirements for the job, and, most importantly, highlight why your company is a great place to work. However, since candidates are likely to research your company, make sure to review all your prospective employees' touchpoints, e.g. your website, your LinkedIn page, your team member’s LinkedIn profiles, your Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and any other social media accounts that might pop up in a Google search. Make sure these channels are consistent in their messaging and paint the right picture so that your candidates get a clear and accurate impression of who you are as a company.
The touchpoint which turned out to be the most effective one for us is our “work with Audvice” playlist, which you can find on our Career Page and on every single job description we post. It’s a playlist our CEO Sophie recorded in our team’s audio library in audvice, published, and embedded as a widget on our channels. She talks about our company culture, so candidates can get some more personal insights before even having their first job interview.
This little hack helped us to get more highly motivated candidates applying for our open jobs. To quote one candidate in their first interview, “I’ve never seen a job description that was so insightful, informative, and personal.”
However, we do not only use audvice to nail the first impression we make as an employer, but also to give candidates the chance to showcase their skills and knowledge, because hiring fast is good, but hiring the right people is better. After the first initial interviews, we ask candidates to do a case study in the form of a playlist. Instead of spending hours on a fancy PowerPoint presentation and booking another meeting to present it, we save us and them a lot of time while having a very good understanding of their work style and approach to problems. We can share the playlist internally to get feedback and then decide if we move the candidate to the next stage in the interview process.
#2 Easy preboarding
The first day in your new job can be quite overwhelming. Your new hires want to make a good impression and will be thankful if you share anything that allows them to get prepared and ready for their new role. However, you can’t give them access to your intranet, knowledge base, or tools before their first day.
This is why we publish certain playlists out of our team’s audio library in audvice and share it with new hires after we signed a contract, e.g.
A team intro playlist, where every team member introduces themselves in a short track
A product intro playlist, where our CEO and our Product Manager explain how our product works, what our customers use it for, which features are live and which are on the way
We also share role-specific playlists, e.g. on our tech stack for product team hires, or the basics of our sales playbook for sales team hires. Or, if onboarding someone who is taking over a position, their predecessor can record a handover playlist, and tell them about the responsibilities of the role.
#3 Simplify onboarding & training
When a new hire starts, you want to provide them with a personal onboarding experience, without necessarily holding their hand all the time, preventing you from getting your own to-dos done.
We onboard new hires with playlists that we record and share in our team’s audio library. What’s great is that we can easily edit and maintain them if needed.
We share playlists on:
Internal structures and processes
Guidelines
Our intranet and collaboration tools
Other software tools we use
Reporting structure
Meeting culture
Team events
Sales playbook
…
The biggest benefit for us is that we can make our onboarding process scalable, as we only have to record it once and share it with every new team member in our audio library. The biggest benefit for new hires is that they can get settled in without pressure and listen back to things they don’t remember.
Playlists can be listened to at their own pace, but the voice still adds that personal touch you want to provide in an onboarding process. Instead of having a lot of onboarding calls that tend to be a monologue by one of your team members, you can instead introduce a few shorter calls where you give the new hires more and better opportunities to engage, ask questions, and get to know your team.
#4 Foster meaningful relationships during the onboarding process
The success of an onboarding experience depends mostly on the people involved. New hires want to meet the full team and form relationships with their colleagues. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to join an introduction call for every new hire. Just saying hi, or – if you are working remotely – sending a short message, will make your new team member feel welcome and part of the team.
At Audvice, we ask every new hire to record a short intro playlist about themselves in our audio library. That way, we get to know them better from the start, and they can also listen to the playlists the rest of us recorded when we first joined the team.
We also love to do icebreaker challenges for every new member, meaning each new hire prepares a little personal info (some facts about themselves, what career background they have, what their hobbies are, what they think is important for a positive work environment, etc.), and presents them in our weekly all-hands meeting. This way, you skip the usual small talk.
#5 Give and receive feedback
Feedback loops will let your employee know that their opinion is valued from the start.
In the first onboarding weeks, it’s important to make more frequent check-ins with your new hire. Make sure to regularly ask them how they are doing and encourage them to ask questions since it’s completely normal to be a bit overwhelmed when you start a new job. This is also a chance to get feedback on your onboarding process. If you find out via these check-ins that there is room for improvement, make sure to take instant action and implement changes. These feedback loops will let your employees know that their opinion is valued from the start and will encourage them to speak up in the future if they feel like things could be improved.
We believe the right onboarding process is standardized, but still personal: a good balance between training new employees and encouraging them to build relationships.