We often hear from frustrated HR professionals that they absolutely love HROnboard, are desperate to revamp their employee onboarding experience, but…..
They don’t have the resources to move off of their existing core HR systems.
If you too are stuck with your lumbering, incumbent HR system and can’t escape it just yet, here’s 3 ways you can improve your employee onboarding process fast.
Integrate a best-of-breed onboarding solution with your current systems
By far the best option is to simply integrate a solution like HROnboard into your existing systems architecture.
We’ve built a bunch of integrations which are freely available in the HROnboard Marketplace. If you can’t find your systems in the list, you do have a few other options:
- Build your own adapter internally (depending on your IT team)
- Integrate your processes, but keep your systems separate
- Hire an external consultant to build your integration (we know loads of integration experts – get in touch if you’d like us to recommend one)
Remember, you don’t need to find the ultimate, perfect solution (that’s already impossible because you can’t get off your old systems!). What you’re really trying to do is find the best way to improve your onboarding with the minimum amount of time and effort expended on your behalf.
We have customers who have opted for each of the three approaches above, and they’re all giving their new hires an awesome onboarding experience. The best solution will depend on your systems, budget and internal resources.
Build your onboarding process and steal those quick wins
It’s often a good idea to plan out what you want your onboarding process to look like first, then go through the effort of implementing a system. To begin with, try building out an onboarding checklist for new hires and hiring managers to complete.
You’ll almost always need to make compromises, as no one has unlimited budget. But at least you’ll have a better understanding of what’s important to your organisation and understand your key priorities.
Most of the time, there will be small changes you’ll uncover during this planning step which have nothing to do with software – welcome packs for new employees, for example.
Focus on these areas for some quick wins, which will help build the business case for a more comprehensive onboarding solution.
Onboard employees, THEN add them to your HR systems!
Sometimes, it’s easier to just separate out your processes. Recruit your candidates well, onboard them well, and then manage them well – manually moving employee data between systems as needed.
Yes, it’s a very painful option. It’s time consuming, there’s room for manual error and it will slow down your internal processes, but often the difference employee onboarding software can make to your new hire’s engagement and time to productivity can be worth the effort.
This approach will also make the problems and limitations of your old HR systems more obvious and easily defined in terms of labour costs, which may just help you build a stronger business case for integrating the whole process.
If in doubt, get in touch with our onboarding specialists. We know the pain you’re facing, and we know all the tricks and solutions to try. We can even help you build you business case for employee onboarding software.
You owe it to your new hires – make their onboarding experience great!