School HR teams across the nation are taking a collective breath and diving into their peak recruitment drive to secure the best staff for the year ahead.
Some lucky recruiters, like the team at Scotch College Adelaide, are going into this prepared. Others are already drowning in the paperwork.
Every year small teams are doing epic amounts of work but even the best teams are getting swamped with the seasonal hiring demands.
What if there was a better way? A way that saves weeks of time and creates an amazing first impression?
5 reasons why you should move your schools’ onboarding to a digital experience right now:
1. Surprise & delight your new school staff
Schools are not widely known for having fast, experience-driven processes. It’s a product of the industry, compliance and process that each hiring and management activity requires.
That standard is changing. By using the right tools, the onboarding experience can be a highly professional ‘first touch’ impression for new staff.
“We regularly receive comments on the professional image our onboarding creates – very different from most school experiences!”
– Morag Greenwood, Director of People and Culture, Scotch College Adelaide
2. Save HUGE amounts of time and automate the offer pack.
The seasonal re-contracting of staff and hiring new teachers puts a major strain on your limited resources. Every position comes with a bundle of compliance forms, personal information and accreditation checks to complete.
Just keeping track of all this paperwork is a task.
Why put yourself through that when you now have an alternative to the old narrative – compliance does not equal drowning in paperwork.
You can take all these documents and put them into a seamless digital experience – one that automates document creation including the offer, supporting policies, Super, Tax, Police Checks and more.
‘We’ve reduced our time to hire from 4 weeks to 3 days – including offer creation, acceptance to back office processing – this is a huge win for our small team’
– Morag Greenwood, Director of People and Culture, Scotch College Adelaide
Collect information once, and then send it where it needs to go. No more manually creating offers or double handling information. You can even do bulk imports to send out multiple offer packs to existing and new employees in a few clicks.
3. Never chase a contract or accreditation, ever again.
With contracts sometimes going out a full term prior to start dates, paper contracts and policies tend to sit and gather dust. Motivating individuals to return completed contracts can be challenging.
However, the data shows that if the process to accept and return documents is easy and intuitive, the time to hire can be reduced from weeks to days.
The timing of offer creation hasn’t changed, but candidate behaviour has.
Paperless onboarding solves the challenge you all face – teachers are not motivated to act quickly when they receive a physical offer pack in the mail or their pigeonhole.
A seamless recruitment and onboarding experience can go a long way to improving your retention of core teaching staff and boost engagement.
Scotch College Adelaide received 80% positive feedback from new starters this year – the other 20% are providing valuable insights into improving the candidate experience.
“This onboarding process is great!”
– Scotch College New Employee
Apart from saving you epic amounts of time, you’ll know months earlier in the hiring cycle what positions you’ll need to hire then kick off recruitment earlier. You’ll secure the best candidates faster while other school’s are still waiting for contracts.
4. See at a glance every offer
Tracking the status of tasks and contracts is impossible using a paper or email based system.
Onboarding tools provide a comprehensive audit trail of every step of the journey against an employees profile.
At the start of each day, teams can generate a report on outstanding contracts or onboarding tasks and automate reminders to ensure each stage is completed.
In the past, reviewers and managers alike struggled to keep in the loop.
Having the recruiting manager as one of the reviewers at contract initiation, they know that the contract has been issued.
The very fast turnaround of most contracts means that reviewers and managers know that within 3 days a contract will be accepted. Now, HR only notifies a reviewer if acceptance has not been received.
Your staff will be clear on what they need to do and how to do it. In addition, they have access to an intuitive way to get it done right the first time.
5. Streamline the way you work
Finally. The integration you’ve all been waiting for!
Every time an offer is accepted, you can now automatically send employees details from HROnboard to the Staff and Payroll modules of Synergetic.
Connecting your onboarding tool into core school management systems like Synergetic adds another layer of efficiency and integrity to your team.
The team at Scotch College Adelaide are nearing their goal of being completely digital.
“One of our objectives is to become as paperless as possible – HROnboard helps enormously with this. Not only are we saving time, we are also saving unnecessary stationary expenses”
– Morag Greenwood, Director of People and Culture, Scotch College Adelaide
Scotch College Adelaide are happily trialling the new HROnboard > Synergetic integration and are seeing some early wins. The integration from onboarding into payroll has picked up the pace of data processing for the team. Data validation during peak hiring can be time-consuming. Having a seamless integration of the core employee details ensure fewer errors and a quicker processing time.
If you’re already suffering flashbacks to last years’ hiring season, why not explore your options for improving your onboarding?
Our team can chat with you about how HROnboard can save you incredible amounts of time, money while creating an exceptional first touch experience for your new employees. And if that doesn’t win you over, the new HROnboard Synergetic integration creates a powerful solution for your seasonal rehiring.
Schedule a chat with an onboarding specialist today.
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