How to level up new hire onboarding

Picture this: it’s Friday afternoon and you’re preparing for nine new hires who are starting on Monday. They're spread across a handful of departments and a few time zones. Some will be starting in offices, others are remote. You plan to draft pre-start date reminders, document-collection surveys, and welcome emails tailored to each of them.

Not only are you thinking about the time you need for personalizing each email but you also take into consideration their different office locations - physical and distributed - and appropriate times for those emails to be sent out. Then, you think about the follow-up emails and meeting invites that will ensue and the time you’ll need to draft and send those… 

• Welcome email
• Benefits Enrollment Checklist
• Welcome lunch
• Day two follow-up email
• Week 1 check-in

…in addition to making sure they have everything they need for a great start - their laptop, company swag, a meal voucher, onboarding buddy assignment, etc. - all while trying to fit in the emails and tasks you’re working on for the new hires that started last week (whoa).

You think, “if only there were a way to do things more efficiently so I can focus on providing a better onboarding experience”. What would you do with all of that extra time? We can name a few things but have a feeling you might already have a list (did someone say company retreat?).

Onboarding is the first chance you get to make a great impression with new hires, so of course you want to make them feel welcome as an instrumental part of the team and set them up for a great start. According to a recent Gallup study: 

• Employees with an exceptional onboarding experience are 2.6 times as likely to be extremely satisfied with their place of work.
• Onboarding fulfills promises made during recruitment and lays the foundation for the rest of the employee life cycle.
• Only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees.

To effectively increase employee retention and, just as important, long-term happiness we strongly recommend evaluating how your priorities are managed and reimagining your onboarding process. We know this probably sounds daunting, but it doesn’t need to be.

What’s the solution?

Using Sora not only enables you to strengthen your onboarding processes with HR automation but it also frees up valuable time for you to focus on strategic initiatives important to total human experience management. As Workday points out, “A positive employee experience is important for business, as happier employees increase retention rates and improve customer satisfaction”, so you definitely don’t want to skimp on improving your overall employee experience - especially onboarding.

With Sora, you can create workflows that remove the manual effort it typically takes to build out task assignments, emails, calendar invites, surveys, messaging, and more. From even before your new hire starts, you can set tasks to send a welcome email on a specific date, create a reminder to collect important new-hire documents, assign a succession of follow-up items to specific employees based on the completion of tasks, and much more. Each workflow you create has features that give you the ability to personalize every employee’s experience, from onboarding to offboarding and everything in between. 

From the very beginning your new hires will be prepared and successful and your HR processes will be efficient, so go ahead and take that day off - we’ve got you covered.

Say goodbye to manual labor

If switching back and forth between multiple HR tools and manually adding and changing data in various places is not how you want to spend your day, we understand you. Sora acts as a central hub for you to easily make changes and direct processes. Data will flow in and out of your existing systems, so you don’t have to worry about all of that manual work.

When a new candidate is hired, ideally all of their information is already populated in your ATS and ready to be fed over to your HRIS so you can get a jump-start on communications and task assignments you need to send out. But what happens if you’re missing important employee data?

Tracking down whoever is responsible to input the data and asking them to populate missing information (and following up when they ultimately miss it on their “to-do” list) is a daunting, time-consuming task. When you have to do that many times over it becomes a barrier to your productivity and, ultimately, a hindrance to an exceptional employee onboarding experience.

Sora easily integrates with ATS and HRIS software like Greenhouse and Workday, so you never have to worry about chasing people down to get missing information or filling up your day with tedious, redundant tasks (like populating the same data in multiple systems). Simply send out a survey with pre-populated questions about the missing information and once the responses are received, the data populates from an employee’s Sora profile to wherever it needs to be - automatically.

Some great people teams have attested to the advantages they’ve gained by integrating Sora with their existing systems and updating their processes for seamless onboarding and happier employees.

If you’re interested in learning more about what Sora can do, check out our sandbox environment or easily schedule a demo with one of our team members - they’d love to show you around!