You can spend all the time in the world hiring the best person for a job, but your effort might be wasted if you don’t properly welcome that new hire onto your staff. Called “onboarding” in the human resources world, this process of integrating new employees into a business is crucial.
Do it right and your new hire hits the ground running, tackling much-needed projects and feeling empowered to contribute hard work and fresh ideas. But onboard a new employee lackadaisically, and that person you carefully vetted and wooed often feels disenfranchised and powerless from the start. That indispensable new staffer might underperform, or even get disgusted and pick up his job search right where he left off.
And that’s an expensive proposition: Staff turnover costs from 25 percent to 250 percent of employees’ annual compensation, depending on their position, according to the American Management Association.
“By delaying that engagement process you also are delaying the return on investment you have made in that employee,” says Karen Melby, managing director in Minneapolis for Steven Douglas Associates, a national executive recruiting and project-based professional services firm. “It’s very important to embrace people and help them understand what they need to do to contribute in order to be successful.”
So how do you productively onboard new hires and help them get a quick start? Read on for five tips.
