Engagement Before Day One- Online Processes Behind Practical Onboarding

July 07, 2009

Whether your customers or your talent has a good experience that evokes a feeling of connectedness, it's rarely by accident. Onboarding processes that are carefully designed for ease of execution can also engage your talent before "Day One." Engagement leads to productivity and retention of critical talent. All this relies on onboarding and assimilation processes that are embraced and brought to life by stakeholders and supporting technology.

Salvador Segura-Ortega, Recruitment Process Lead for IBM Canada, shared their successful practices in onboarding to engage talent before day one using online practical processes. He identified challenges involved in onboarding, such as:

• Size and complexity of organizations
• Mobile employees or global employees, that is employees reporting to managers in a different country
• Complexity of requirements for new employees (access to systems, tools, information)
• Navigation for new employees through highly matrixed organizations
• Generational differences

The key success factor, stated Salvador Segura, is to have an integrated strategy with the new employee experience in mind and commitment from everyone in the organization towards onboarding. From the outset, IBM’s goal was to have prospective and new talent feel engaged. IBM surveyed new hires to ask what their experiences were and designed their onboarding processes to trigger these emotions (committed, passionate, loyal, comforted, energized, encouraged, belonging, able and recognized).

Then they created an online and practical onboarding process to make their candidates to feel excited and connected and wanting to join and engage fully at IBM:

• Recruitment involves an end to end candidate experience from the moment they connect with the company to the time they start.
• Our purpose is to ensure that the candidate is engaged during the entire recruitment process with multiple touch points.
• We want our prospective employees to feel that they are joining a world class company.

• Recruitment involves an end to end candidate experience since the moment they connect with the company to the time they start.
• Our purpose is to ensure that the candidate is engaged during the entire recruitment process with multiple touch points.
• We want our prospective employees to feel that they are joining a world class company

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