10 Ideas / Innovations for Induction (sponsored by iCIMS)

I seem to have been posting quite a bit on recruiting recently, which I guess is natural, given the recent growth in activity recently.

But what about induction?  We’re not going to get the returns we need from recruiting if we’re not onboarding new hires effectively.  And after a lull in recruiting activity it could be a good time to take induction off the shelf and give a dust over.

Here are 10 ideas for putting a bit more oomph in the way you may be inducting currently:

1.   Have some clear objectives for what you hope to achieve.  It’s useful to provide some KPIs you can measure against. It will also help ensure you can focus on the things that are going to make the biggest difference to someone’s potential and success.

2.   Probably the biggest shift can often be just raising the level of ambition about what you’re trying to do.  Don’t just focus on activity, set the goal of achieving some stretching and useful outcomes to raise the level of the bar in terms of the capability of people working in the organisation!

3.   Ensure induction and recruiting are well integrated.  This covers two objectives, Firstly, it’s about doing the simple things well - ensuring that new hires get the induction that need, when they need.  Secondly, it’s about allowing you to make more nuanced decisions in your talent management.  For example, allowing you to compare an excellent candidate who fits all of your specifications, but who might be quite expensive, with someone who doesn’t quite fit the bill - but with the right induction and onboarding, could be a star performer, and would be significantly cheaper too.

4.   Guide rather than assess your new joiners through their induction, training and probation.  Don’t expect them to fail and don’t worry too much about catching them if they do.  Put your effort into supporting them to ensure that they don’t!

5.  Personalise the support.  Don’t treat everyone the same - we’re not, so don’t act like we are.  I loved this research from Harvard Business Review  –that focuses on finding and emphasising the importance of focusing on peoples’ strengths.  Find out what they can do, what else they need, and then, deliver it.

6.  Start referrals!  The best time to generate employee referrals is often before your new hires’ existing contacts start to reduce both in numbers and depth of the relationships involved.  Help your new starters spread the word that they’re joining you, and you may find some more great people too.

7.   Think about the team!  You may only be inducting one person now, but it’s not just that person that’s going to have to change.  One new person means a whole set of altered relationships.  Broaden the focus to the other people they’ll be working with - how can you ensure they’re onboard and ready to work with the new hire too?

8.   Make it social!  This is partly about helping new hires use social tools to find out about company information, and make the contacts that they’ll need.  But it’s also about getting them using social tools as well.  Have them tweet / blog or otherwise update on their experiences - it’s a great way for other employees to get to know them and does wonders for their own learning experience as well.

9.   Make it fun!  Induction can be deathly but it doesn’t need to be.  Give your new recruits challenges and activities, games and assignments.  This doesn’t need to involve gamification but it probably shouldn’t involve a big, heavy manual to read either!

10.   Use technology. Technology is never the full answer to anything, but it’s an increasingly big part of the response to most questions.  Most of the other ideas listed above will be that much easier to implement with a sound recruiting and induction platform in place.

 

This post is sponsored by iCIMS.

iCIMS is the leading provider of talent acquisition software for growing businesses. Through the implementation of easy-to-use, web-based solutions, the iCIMS Talent Platform helps organisations manage everything from sourcing, to recruitment, to induction all within one streamlined application.

Check out a free walk-through of the iCIMS system or make contact at +44 (0) 118 9000 706 or europeansales@icims.com.

 

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