The Next Normal Of Employer Brand 7

The Next Normal Of Employer Brand

Welcome to this new weekly video series on “The Next Normal” of employer brand, by Bryan Adams and Dave Hazlehurst of employer brand agency, Ph.Creative. We’ll be sharing some cool content that we as an agency are interested in, and also some content that you lot as a community are driving. We hope you find our views and take on the industry just as interesting - and unusual - as we do.

In episode seven, Dave and Bryan discuss…

Personalizing onboarding

Right now within the employee experience, almost everything has been digitalized. As well as your employer brand and talent attraction you need to look at what this means for your onboarding strategy and what it will look like; digitalizing but still taking it beyond the screen.

With high-volume roles which you’re filling quickly, be careful not to depersonalize the experience. Firstly, we should try empathy mapping, start to understand the experience from the candidate and the hiring manager’s point of view.

Recognize the different touchpoints somebody has to go through while onboarding and ask yourself, how long will that take? How can we do this digitally? What tech do we use and what do we put into that technology? What’s the appropriate messaging? These are all the elements we need to start mapping and ensure it’s practical.

From an empathy standpoint, hiring managers who are overseeing the onboarding process have lost the physicality aspect which is normally mapped at every stage, and we can all agree it was a big part of the process.
 

Day one, especially for the candidate, is so important, meeting the team and getting all your equipment etc. These are steps that have radically changed in the past 3 months.

Networking and integrating internally is such an important part of any candidate’s journey. Start to consider the task of onboarding someone a wider shared responsibility with the whole team, which would normally just sit with the hiring manager or HR team pre-pandemic. There are also other opportunities to make the existing employees feel equally as part of the team as you’re onboarding new, boosting morale and employee engagement. 

All the experiences connected

Onboarding can become such a shared experience with the whole team where you’re creating a buzz of excitement, everyone’s talking about it, preparing and getting involved. 

All the experiences start to join together. You’ve got your candidate experience, onboarding experience, employee experience, and off-boarding experience, all these flow together. With great onboarding and the team behind it, you create bonds and a sense of belonging but also advocacy as well. 

People start talking and things start getting shared organically. This could then develop an opportunity for referral campaigns, suddenly onboarding as a focus gives a lot more in return. 

There’s a chance here you’re able to demonstrate and deliver to the candidate who you are, your proposition, and pillars of culture through digital means more easily than physical circumstances. Using the technologies available like Zoom, delivering chunks of information in a captivating way that’s engaging with no deadline on when it needs to be digested by the receiver, and setting up meetings for 1-to-to introductions.

Check out what our friends at Altru are getting up to and see how they can help you with your onboarding strategy and employee experience!

Our thought, if it seems like a complicated plan then don't do it but by all means, get creative. Time is of the essence with onboarding, it's a crucial time where in normal circumstances of fast pace life, again before everyone was working remotely, these things could likely be delayed and damaging to the beginning of the relationship. You don't want to make promises to a candidate that you can't keep as this would dampen the experience, digitally these things could be done quicker. 

Bettering the experience 

It’s essential for anybody to get feedback in order to grow. Especially feedback on the experiences.

For the new starters, they’re in a position where it’s fresh in their minds having just gone through it to feedback their experience to the hiring manager or the whole team, depending on who was involved.

Explain that you need them to be honest. The positives, which will hopefully energize the team showing a great job they’ve done but also the harsh realities. For an organization showing they're authentic and using their employees' stories to better the experiences and ultimately, attract more talent, can’t achieve this without being vulnerable.

It all starts with a set of questions to ask, like “what worked well?" and “what should we improve?”. 

Whether it’s positive or negative the results, you’re showing your employees that you value their opinion and are trying to adapt with agility on real-time responses. Putting this stage in place though, not just for onboarding but for all processes, is, in turn, improving the employee’s experience. Giving them that sense of belonging but having them make an impact.

For more information on boarding digitally, check out Bryan’s latest article, 8 Best Practice Ideas To Onboard Talent Digitally.

Without going into too much detail we've mentioned candidate experience, for further information you can find out everything you need to know and more on empathy mapping by downloading our free Candidate Experience eBook. 


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