Social Onboarding is proving to dramatically increase return on new hire

Social Onboarding is proving to dramatically increase return on new hire.

Onboarding is the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective organisational members of a company. Typically, ‘onboarding’ is understood as the full process – i.e. from recruitment to the new hire being fully operational. It is estimated that it takes an average of 10 months and could costs as much as USD100.000 before a new hire can be turned into an asset.

Fast forward past the recruitment and administration phases, starts the ramp-up period. ‘Ramp-up’ is the time during which a new hire is still learning the role and getting acclimated to the work environment — i.e. “learning the ropes.”. New employees tend to get less work done because they are still figuring out how to execute their responsibilities, to navigate new communication workflows, and to establish relationships. New hires also consume a lot of resources from already integrated employees. That is why the ‘Ramp-up’ is the most critical and, naturally, the most expensive part of the ‘onboarding’ process. Fortunately, this is also the one part of the process organisations can actually impact the most. Indeed, with the advent of enterprise social networks the opportunity to largely accelerate so-called ‘organisational socialisation’ is real. Faster ramp-up time, smoother integration to the life of the organisation and its culture, tighter peer-to-peer connections clearly means faster returns, hence profitability for the company.

Arnaud Henneville, co-founder at internalDesk says:

“We have been working with various clients on what we call ‘Social Onboarding’. The results have been more than exciting. We’ve seen new recruits more rapidly hitting the ground running. For example, we’ve seen them understanding what makes the business move forward way faster. We’ve seen them demonstrating the sought-after behaviours much faster than their peers who did not have access to the platform. We have also witnessed that beyond acquiring formal knowledge as distributed by the official voice of the company i.e. its leaders (both online and offline), new employees who were also connecting informally online were able to quickly learn the tricks of the trade from experienced peers. The results are clear: to have access to an online open-network accelerates the onboarding process. This, in turn, dramatically improves returns on new hire.“

Contact us now to learn about how we can help your organisation accelerate its return on onboarding.