Employee onboarding and training can be tricky, tedious, and expensive. The process of scouting, interviewing, recruiting, and then training new resources is itself a separate project. It can prove far more challenging in economic crunch periods.
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Factors That Influence the Cost of Onboarding
As it is a multi-step process, each step of onboarding can add to the overall cost of integrating a new hire to your organization. Here are a few of the factors that contribute to the total expenditure; these should be accounted for in advance of any hiring efforts.
A Company’s Scale
The bigger a company’s size, the more complex and lengthier its onboarding process requirement will be. As a consequence, their hiring process also lends itself to being more expensive.
HR Hours
Onboarding is a primarily labor-intensive task. Accounting for people power is a necessary expense for which to budget. It takes up long hours from your HR department, which ends up being costly when the use of such manpower comes at the expense of other tasks.
Department-Specific Training
All new recruits require at least some degree of training or briefing in order to be able to carry out the tasks required of them. This includes the time taken by the trainer and any resources and materials relevant to the training program.
Ways to Reduce the Cost
There are ways to offload the financial burden of training new talent:
Partner with a Staffing Agency
The onboarding process tends to be boring and repetitive for HR departments. It takes up a significant amount of time that might be allocated to other high-priority tasks. By partnering with a staffing agency, you can offload this task to professionals who can leverage the power of automation and industry knowledge.
Automating certain tasks often radically minimizes workload and redirects focus to important areas of operations. A team communication tool, for example, can digitize all forms and supplemental paperwork and enable workers to fill them out using their phones. This eliminates the need to micromanage new employees’ completion of each form, shoring up the onboarding process and expediting a productive start.
Better and more comprehensive employee onboarding software options streamline and optimize the process by fostering better communication, tracking employee productivity and lifecycle, providing training facilities and capabilities, and enabling ease of access to scheduling and payroll functions. This not only helps better regulates the performance appraisal process; it boosts compliance and improves employee engagement.
Look for Specialization and Experience
Intuitively, the most effective way to reduce the cost of onboarding is by selecting a candidate who is both qualified and experienced, in both their discipline at large and the position for which they have applied. An employee who is already familiar with the kind of work that is expected of them would require the least amount of guidance, reducing their time to productivity.
If a resource has previously handled a call center job, for instance, they would often be familiar with what is expected of agents. With less guidance, they should immediately be able to offer insight into better first-call resolution rates, customer satisfaction rates, and average handling time.
Similarly, if a company hires a full-stack web developer, they will require far less time to understand a comparable job requirement and implementation, relative to a novice in the same space. This is also the best way to filter out a potentially insubordinate employee, as their resume and work history should necessarily reflect abrupt disruptions to their career.
Keep the Fun Alive
While higher employee turnover results in a larger number of employees interfacing together, everyone is rightly wary of a toxic work environment. It is important to curate a rewarding, comprehensive, and efficient onboarding experience that includes thoughtful activities, games, and ice-breaking sessions. This maximizes engagement and contributes to long-term employee loyalty and satisfaction.
Welcome lunches and small celebrations to honor the new employees are often memorable and make for healthy employee culture. Imparting a good first impression on new hires is particularly important for employee retention – a company secures long-term resources and avoids repeated budget investment by investing wisely in recruitment and onboarding once.
Rely on eLearning Techniques and Training Videos
It is usually managers themselves who end up training new recruits, which often means that the valuable time they could spend performing other supervisory tasks is lost. There are aspects of training that undoubtedly need to be imparted in person, such as the use of a specific piece of machinery or answers to immediate questions.
However, a lot of time and money can be saved by creating a training video that caters to the common questions of all future recruits. This would save supervisors the trouble of repeating the same training program multiple times, reducing the long-term cost of the onboarding program.
Online or video-based learning also guarantees other advantages – principally, easy and unlimited access to repetitive training, and open enrollment communication, among other benefits. Rather than having to bother supervisors for answers, new employees can simply refer to such instructional videos for answers.
From a holistic point of view, onboarding costs are inherently inevitable. However, companies can take measures to regulate their investment by automating the process and keeping track of their expenses. Utilizing a mobile-first workforce communication tool can help companies create a far more efficient and effective onboarding process that engages employees from the onset.
