At first glance, talent sourcing and onboarding may seem like two independent processes. After all, recruiting new hires and integrating them into the company should be handled by two separate teams, right? Not quite. Setting up your newest employee for success should start before they even submit their application.
When you’re working with different digital tools and loosely collaborating across departments, streamlining talent sourcing and onboarding procedures can be tricky. However, if you integrate recruitment software into your employee onboarding process, you can ensure a great candidate experience every step of the way.
In this article, we’ll outline the benefits of streamlining your talent acquisition and onboarding practices in one seamless tool.
Before we get into it, let’s clarify a couple of terms. Talent sourcing essentially refers to all the steps needed to convince someone to apply for an open position. While talent sourcing and recruitment are often used interchangeably, the goal of the former is to turn non-applicants into applicants, as opposed to converting applicants into employees. Sourcing is the key to any successful recruitment effort and often takes place on job boards or LinkedIn.
Throughout the entire hiring process, an applicant’s perception of your company matters immensely. Also referred to as candidate experience, both your talent sourcing and recruitment processes should clearly convey your company’s selling points. Ensuring a positive candidate experience increases both the likelihood that an applicant accepts your job offer and that they will actually stay working in their position for an extended period of time.
But how do you improve your candidate experience to set you up for onboarding success in the future? It’s easy – get people excited about your company! The simplest way to streamline this process is by implementing specialized recruitment tools.
The majority of larger organizations tend to handle talent sourcing and onboarding separately. A recruiter hires a new employee, who is then onboarded by their immediate manager with support from HR.
This disconnect between stakeholders is problematic, as it could lead to even the most well-intentioned hiring efforts going to waste. Here are three problems that companies may face if they don’t combine their recruitment and employee onboarding processes.
1. A discrepancy between expectation and reality
A study by ThriveMap found that 48% of full-time employees have left their jobs because of a disconnect between their expectations and the reality of the position, with conflicts relating to job responsibilities, working environments, and work hours contributing most strongly to their decisions. These attitudes were most significant for the youngest working pool of Gen Z 18 to 24-year-olds, where 73% mentioned leaving their job due to unmet expectations.
In this scenario, a lack of clear communication is often to blame. For example, the recruiter and hiring manager may have a slightly different understanding of what exactly a position will entail. If a recent hire has been promised certain benefits – such as flexible hours or a future pay bump – which are not realistic in practice, they’re likely to feel letdown. Then, it’s hardly surprising if they look for an open position elsewhere.
In most cases, companies mean no harm if they fail to unify employee expectations and the presented reality. It’s often just a matter of disconnect between teams, which could have been prevented through regular meetings with both recruiters and onboarding managers.
2. The chance of negative word-of-mouth
When somebody leaves a company feeling dissatisfied, they will likely tell their entire social circle about it. Whether due to empty promises or trouble fitting in within the team, negative word of mouth is hardly great for future candidate experiences, right? It can lead to applicants dropping out of the hiring process or dissuade them from applying in the first place.
While it’s impossible to control how every employee speaks about your company in their free time, treating the recruitment and onboarding team as independent stakeholders certainly won’t help your employer branding tactics.
3. Loss of time, money and resources
Imagine someone accepts a position at your company, completes their employee onboarding process and quits after three months due to unmet expectations. And just like that, you have to post the job listing again.
A study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that it usually takes 42 days to fill an open position, while the average cost per employee hire is €4494, according to MasteryWorks. In most cases, it’s also more cost-effective for companies to retain and retrain existing employees than to restart the talent sourcing process from scratch.
An easy way to optimize your expenditure of time, money and resources is by combining your recruitment and onboarding processes to ensure that you’re setting your employees up for success in a position that they will want to continue working in.
Now, you’re well aware of the challenges associated with talent sourcing and onboarding. But how can integrated recruitment tools help you overcome these barriers?
Recruitment tools that are seamlessly integrated with onboarding can revamp your entire hiring process by helping you make promises you can keep, boosting employee engagement and optimizing your resources. Here are the three benefits of combining your talent sourcing and employee onboarding process within one comprehensive platform, such as Talmundo by Talentech.
Benefit 1: Better collaboration helps prevent costly mistakes
Picture this: A new hire has accepted your offer, and their start date is right around the corner. Everything’s ready to go – the recruiter has come up with a great onboarding plan intended to make the employee feel welcome and emailed it over to HR. But, on the first day, things don’t go as smoothly as planned. The new employee has to start without their own laptop, because the HR department forgot to ask IT to order it.
If your recruiters and HR professionals are used to working in their own, separate tools, information can easily be overlooked or misunderstood. And relying on email communication alone to keep everyone in the loop is time-consuming for both departments.
An integrated talent acquisition set-up as part of your onboarding software is an easy fix for this dilemma. Recruiters can efficiently share any information or action points with their HR colleagues by automatically transferring them from the recruitment to the onboarding portal. This prevents mistakes, ensures that everyone is on the same page and sets your new hire up for success.
Benefit 2: One tool helps reduce recruiting and onboarding spend
Working across multiple recruitment and onboarding solutions doesn’t just increase the likelihood of costly mistakes. It also requires you to pay for these tools separately and nurture more than one stakeholder relationship with their providers, taking more time and costing you more money.
You can ditch this extra effort if you combine your recruitment and onboarding efforts. A unified tool will centralize all processes that you may have relied on separate solutions to do, such as overseeing employee referrals, reporting on analytics, tracking talent in an ATS or optimizing your onboarding efforts. By streamlining these, you’re left with one stakeholder relationship and one bill to pay at the end of the month.
Benefit 3: A unified new hire experience improves brand ‘stickiness’
As an employer, your goal is to become a company that people want to work for and stay working for in the future. While there’s no one fool-proof way to boost your retention, ticking certain boxes will surely put you on the right track.
Though it matters at every stage of the employee lifecycle, your employer branding strategy should start during recruitment and be maintained throughout onboarding. By using one comprehensive tool for both processes, you’re fully in control of your platform’s user experience. For example, a smooth application process is a great first impression, which will likely ‘stick’ when that person starts their first day and receives an equally seamless onboarding.
With a unified recruitment and onboarding set-up, you’ll also be able to collect feedback and apply it for constant improvement. Streamlined messaging across departments ensures that everyone is up to date, while access to in-depth hiring analytics and dashboards empowers you to make the right data-driven decisions for your people. All of this will improve your employer brand, boosting retention with current new hires and increasing the likelihood of successful recruitments in the future.
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The takeaway |
Your resources are precious, as are your company’s reputation and the promises you make to your new hires. Safeguarding these and sidestepping any mishaps is most efficiently done by integrating recruitment tools into your onboarding process.
Not only can one comprehensive platform help you prevent mistakes through enhanced collaboration across departments, but a unified set-up can also help you save money, boost your employee retention, take charge of your employer branding and make data-driven decisions to optimize your operations.
In other words: If you’d like to future-proof your company, a streamlined recruitment and onboarding platform is non-negotiable.
Looking for an integrated recruitment tool that is seamlessly integrated with onboarding? Then Talmundo by Talentech is the perfect solution for you.
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