Recruiting and onboarding new employees is a challenge for any business. Making a strong first impression is crucial to reassure your new employee they made a good decision signing on and to get them to stay longer.
A good recruitment process reduces turnover, strengthens your company culture, and reduces the time it takes a new hire to get up to speed. However, it can be difficult to achieve. Thankfully, a professional employer organization can help.
Tips for Conducting Your Hiring Process
Your hiring process starts with the search for candidates and moves through onboarding and training. Recruitment is the first phase and is equally important as the others. You need to find and interview the right candidates, ensuring they are a good fit for the skills you need and your company's culture and values.
Developing a solid hiring process is essential and helps ensure you do not encounter compliance issues. Working with a PEO can give you the guidance you need to do so. They can help you narrow the scope of what should be in your job description, ensuring clarity so that fewer unqualified candidates apply.
Then they can help you select and decide which candidates to move forward with promptly so good candidates are not left hanging. A slow hiring process can result in the perfect candidate being sniped by another company before you can interview them. Also, ensure that your process includes steps to avoid burning bridges with the second-tier candidates you might want to return to if your first choice does not work out. Too many companies ghost candidates at some stage, discouraging them from applying again.
A smooth hiring process is also a more cost-effective one. You won't need to readvertise positions if you find the right person the first time or have backup candidates in mind. Also, you will be able to fill the position quickly, reducing costly downtime.
How PEOs Make Onboarding and Training a Smooth Process
The last thing you want to do is find the perfect candidate for a position, leaving them hanging during onboarding and watching them quit in less than a year. Poor onboarding makes you look disorganized and can encourage your new hire to update their resume immediately.
Onboarding and training are crucial to transition and acclimate the new hire to their role and demonstrate that your company is a good, stable place to work. In today's world, pre-onboarding is essential. New hires should be able to complete most paperwork remotely and arrive at the office with their access and equipment set up and tasks waiting for them. That eliminates the frustration of spending the first day or even the first week trying to get into their email.
PEOs can help you handle the paperwork so it is all done on time. They can also advise you on creating appropriate training materials to help your employees become productive. It is vital for an excellent first impression and to ensure that you earn respect from your new hires. They need to know you are competent and organized if they will commit to your organization in the long term.
PEOs can also advise on ongoing training. Younger employees, in particular, want to feel that you invest in them and care about their future and growth. In many ways, onboarding can last up to a year as you continue to work with the employee. Finally, getting feedback about the onboarding process is essential so you can continue improving.
Get Back More Time for Your Employees
Recruiting is time-consuming, and only some tasks require heavy knowledge of your company. By outsourcing tedious administrative tasks to a PEO, your HR staff has more time to select candidates.
That extends beyond recruiting, of course. Working with a PEO means they handle payroll and benefits administration, which would otherwise have to be handled by the HR team or, worse, the owner. You and your employees can support staff and develop a quality workplace culture.
That, in turn, increases productivity and retention. Good company culture can become a positive feedback cycle. As people are more engaged and productive, the culture continually improves.
Employee recruitment is costly. You must do it right the first time. Recruitment issues can lead to hiring the wrong person or having a good candidate either not taking the job or quitting quickly. A PEO can help make this a more cost-effective process and also make sure that you give new hires the impression that will get them to stick around.
