New Hire Orientation

Everyone knows that the average hiring process is less than perfect. In fact, most selection processes have high failure rates (i.e. even after months or even years of “assessment,” nearly 60 percent of the marriages in California end in divorce). So it shouldn’t be a surprise that as many as …

Employee engagement is at or near the top of most surveys that cover the concerns of HR leaders. Almost everyone is enthusiastic about the concept and their program. However, there is far too little focus on the problems or issues related to engagement. My research and experience with HR leaders …

The Root of the Problem Most corporate onboarding programs are designed from the HR administrator’s perspective. The goal and focus is to ease the administrative burden on HR and to drive compliance activities, not to ensure that new hires can reach expected levels of productivity in the shortest time frame …

This checklist continues last week’s article about comparing your onboarding program against the design components of a “world-class” onboarding program. Part 3: Operational Design Components   The last level of components for world-class onboarding programs is still important, even though they are more operational in nature. They include the following: …

Part 1: Primary Strategic Goals of Onboarding The items in this section are the primary strategic goals that serve as the foundation for world-class onboarding programs. Incidentally, they also differentiate onboarding from the more traditional “orientation” approach. The program should have clear and measurable goals that are communicated to all. …

The Problem With Most Onboarding Approaches Like many programs in human resources, onboarding programs suffer from narrow perspective design. Quite frankly, they are designed by people who truly have no idea what value talent provides or how to maximize the value of that talent. The most common evidence of this …

Ever wonder what happens to the people you recruit after they begin their jobs? Strange as it may seem, most recruiters never actually follow up on the progress of their recruits on the job. I call it “dropping them over the wall and running away.” Why Follow Up? Failing to …

In Part One of this series, we outlined some important concepts that managers should consider implementing in order to create a top notch employee orientation program. Following up on these concepts, below is one of the most important tools of all: the employee orientation questionnaire. This questionnaire is the backbone of a …

The first week on the job can play a crucial role in motivating and retaining new employees. We often spend lots of time and money recruiting and wooing new employees and as soon as they start we turn around and treat them like barely welcome strangers. We need to begin …

There have been several posts lately (HRNET) on how to improve Orientation. Through my work in retention, I have found that poor orientation can increase “buyers remorse” and thus increase turnover. Below are some orientation tools you might find a welcome addition to what you currently do. Not all tools …