“That time between offer and joining is like a black hole and the highest chance of losing a candidate. If they then join and there is no structure to the onboarding, there is even more risk they will leave or not be set up to succeed”.
I wrote this to someone this week and it went viral on twitter – it got compared to the sales process and losing a prospect right at the final stage. People are no different to your customers and more and more companies are realising that in order to ensure customer success and overall business success, it’s important to start with your People. Put your people first, they will be happy, and your business will succeed. I was always taught that hiring good people is easy. It’s hiring great people that is the challenge. So once you’ve gone to all the effort of hiring it seems crazy not to look after your hires before they join. And don’t be afraid to ask the hiring manager to help you out – they are soon to be their team members after all, and it’s in their best interest that their new hire comes on board as engaged as they were during the hiring process and ready to be productive and give their new role their all. Here are a couple of tips you can do to keep your new hires engaged between offer and joining date.
1. Do you have a monthly meeting, a lunch or a social event? Invite them along and ask their new team to host them.
2. Send them a Congratulations or Welcome to the Company card in the mail – people rarely receive exciting things in the mail these days so this gesture will make more of an impact than you might think.
3. Send them their onboarding and induction info well ahead of the joining date – they can get excited about it and it also eliminates those nerves of ‘what will I be doing in Week 1?’
4. Have an Onboarding plan – most companies don’t - so chances are your new joiner will have low expectations – use this to your advantage and pleasantly surprise them! You’ll be on the front foot from Day 1 then.
5. If you provide them with any company apparel upon joining, as them for their size so that you have it ahead of them joining – the warm fuzzy feeling they’ll get of knowing they have a company hoodie to look forward to cannot be underestimated.
Above all – don’t forget about your candidate once you’ve hired them and expect them to show up on Day 1 engaged and raring to go – it’s the company’s role to make sure they don’t get tempted by a ‘better offer’ from a competitor and decline your offer in that hiring black hole period between hire and join date.
Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn) recently interviewed Aneel Bhusri who is the co-founder of Workday, and exactly what I've written about above describes Aneel's experience of joining PeopleSoft - it was the person and the team he decided to join and the experience that he had when he initially joined, that set the tone for the experience he would have there and what would keep him in engaged.
HOFFMAN: But for Aneel, setting the culture — and setting an employee-first culture — was the most burning fire. His belief in setting the right tone dates back to his very first day on his very first job. He was going to work for David, his future co-founder, at PeopleSoft in the early 1990s. BHUSRI: Everybody was really friendly: opening doors, saying hi, looking at you when you walk in and saying hi, all the kind of nice things. Everybody welcomed me, people took me under their wing to teach me the ropes. The personal pieces of it make such a huge difference and sort of sets the tone for your career at a company. HOFFMAN: But the part of Workday that imprinted most strongly on Aneel was David himself.
https://mastersofscale.com/#/aneel-bhusri-the-elusive-formula-for-great-hiring
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