What is Employee Onboarding?

Essentially, employee onboarding is the process through which new employees learn the skills and knowledge necessary for them to succeed in a position at your company.

Chances are you've been through the employee onboarding process before. You advertise your job listing, interview promising applicants, and then make job offer to your top qualifying applicant. Now comes the hard part: onboarding the new hire.

Employee onboarding is different for every company. Every hiring team has a different hiring process for helping the new employee adjust to the company culture, the job and what is to be expected of him or her in the new job role they have been hired on for. No matter how different or unique your employee onboarding process is, there's one thing they all have in common: new hire documentation.

Each new hire comes with a checklist of actions to take before it is made official. These checklist items might include:

• Checking application references.
• Sending the job offer letter.
• Filling out new hire paperwork.

Each one of these employee onboarding tasks is just as important as the next. The documentation of the new hire can be just as imperative as actually teaching your new employee the tricks of the trade and how to succeed in his or her new job.

1. Check Application References

The question of whether or not you should check an applicant's references is always up for debate. But not checking applicant's references could come back to bite you later on. Checking an applicant's references can be more helpful in the employee onboarding process than hurtful.

Through applicant references, you will learn more about an employee's work ethic than you will on the submitted application or during a job interview. What better way to learn about the employee you are considering for hire than to talk with previous employers or close associations!

When you require a references section on your job application, the applicant knows it's very likely you will contact the references to learn more about him or her. While the references an applicant includes on an application may give glowing accounts of the employee, that isn't always the case.

Most importantly, by filling out the references section of the application, an applicant gives the hiring manager permission to contact one or all of the references included. You, the hiring manager, might as well take advantage of that opportunity and learn more about a job candidate you are considering for hire before making the job offer. ApplicantPro allows you to easily check applicant's references during the hiring process.

2. Send the Job Offer Letter

The 2nd step of the employee onboarding process is making the final decision: who to hire.

Once you've checked the applicant's references, screened the applicant, and interviewed your candidate, you decide which applicant will be the best fit for the company and extend the job offer to that applicant.

A job offer letter can be pretty standard - a simple letter that is standard for all of your new hires. Many employers use a template letter that requires little to fill out, besides the name of the applicant, your name or the hiring manager's name, and agreed upon job compensation and other work benefits. Printing the job offer letter and sending it out through the postal service or email is easy enough to do.

3. Keep Track of All New Hire Paperwork

One of the biggest challenges that comes from new hire paperwork is getting it to and back from the new employee. This can be particularly challenging when there are offsite employees involved.

Do you mail the new hire paperwork? Will the new employee get the new hire paperwork? Once they include all of their personal information, do they mail the new hire paperwork back? Will you receive the new hire paperwork from them and in a timely manner? What happens if the new hire paperwork isn't received? Will you be liable?

There is also the issue of accuracy of information on the new hire paperwork. Will the new hire complete all of the necessary forms associated with the new hire paperwork?

These and others are the problems that come with employee onboarding using paper documents. There are several applicant tracking systems on the market that allow for paperless employee onboarding. The company we partner with for employee onboarding has an easy process.

ApplicantPro's online employee onboarding process includes:

• Allowing hiring managers to send a link over email where the new hire will enter their own email and password.
• New employees will complete their paperwork by simply answering a series of questions and then populating the fields on each new hire form. This helps with employee frustration due to redundancy in questions and cuts back on errors by asking each question only one time.
• Once completed, the new employee reviews and signs each new hire form, online and submits each one for HR review.
• Notifications can be set up and once received by hiring managers, can be reviewed and completed from the HR side. For example, with the form I9 once documents are reviewed, your portion can be completed and signed off on from the online portal as well.

Overall, online employee onboarding helps your company ‘go green' and can save you a headache from new hire paperwork. No more filing cabinets or paper copies floating around with new hire information.

Many online systems allow for open enrollment to be done through them as well. If you switch insurance providers and need forms completed by each and every employee, the forms can be uploaded into the system and completed by each employee. At a glance you will know which employees have completed these forms and who has not. Also, sending reminder emails directly from the system can help streamline the hiring process for you.

An Applicant Tracking System, like ApplicantPro, allows you to do all of this and more by integrating employee onboarding into your hiring process. With a single click, you can send out a job offer letter, contact an applicant's references, and request onboarding paperwork from a new employee as well as keep a record of it for legal purposes.

Don't stress about making sure the proper documentation is made for when you hire a new employee. Employee onboarding is meant to be as smooth as possible to assimilate your new employee into the workplace, which includes onboarding documents.

Find out how ApplicantPro can help you easily onboard your new hires!
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