Integrated On-boarding Drives Alignment: Best Practices for On-boarding Design & Implementation

January 27, 2009

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Onboarding may not be on the radar screen of senior talent leaders. This may be because they are more focused on related outcomes, such as productivity, retention, and deployment of leaders. Or the issues to tackle seem too daunting, such as a geographically dispersed enterprise with little consistency regarding talent onboarding. Leaders may think their organizations have the new hire’s needs covered with an orientation program. However orientation typically lasts 2 days to 2 weeks, after which “it’s every hire for themselves.” Organizations that don’t manage the new person’s experience don’t know if they are being true to their brand. Moreover, they miss tracking the new hire’s career planning and potential in the company up through the person’s first annual performance review, which is when the full return from the onboarding investment is most evident.

Not customizing aspects of individuals’ onboarding results in missing more needs than not. While the process of onboarding benefits from standardization, relying on a cookie cutter approach for specifics results in disengagement from all stakeholders. To engage multiple stakeholders, each of them gets to own the part of the process they can most impact. When managers are accountable for new hires to be successful, they are more inclined to use onboarding as a talent management tool.

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