Employee onboarding: how to do it in 4 simple steps
- Your plan for onboarding new employees is crucial to making your new hire feel welcome and retaining great team members.
- The best way to onboard new hires is to use effective small business employee onboarding software.
- Homebase’s onboarding program gets the ball rolling before your new employee’s start date, and manages onboarding tasks so you don’t have to.
Step 1: Hire top talent
In order to onboard new hires, you have to actually hire them first. With the plethora of job posting sites online today, it can be time-consuming to make sure you’ve covered all of your hiring process bases, from applicant screening to background checks, especially if you don’t have a hiring manager to help.
Tip: Homebase’s free employee hiring tool makes posting jobs and finding the best candidates easy and quick.
With Homebase hiring, you can create a job post in less than a minute. We even have pre-written, customizable job descriptions from which you can choose. Then you can post it to the top job boards—including Indeed, Zip Recruiter, Glassdoor, and more—for free.
Once you receive responses, you can manage employee applicants, no matter what site they’re coming from, in one place. You can also message them straight from the Homebase app to schedule interviews.
After a successful interview is conducted and a job offer is made, you can import the winning candidate straight into your Homebase team and schedule his or her first shift. Then you can start next step towards an effective onboarding experience.
Step 2: Prepare for your employee’s first day
As mentioned earlier, part of your onboarding checklist includes getting your new hire’s paperwork in order before he or she starts working. This includes not only contact information and employment contracts, but also federal and state forms that are required by law to be completed by each employee.
Homebase can automate onboarding employees in this area as well. In fact, we’ve made it easy for your new hires to self-onboard before the job starts so you have more time on the first day to introduce your staff to their new teammate.
When using Homebase, your new hire will receive a new hire packet that includes every required U.S. federal and state new hire form. Before starting work, the employee will be able to enter their information and provide the necessary e-signatures. We’ll even securely store them after the employee onboarding process to ensure you are organized and compliant.
The most important aspect of your new hire checklist is to make sure you’re correctly storing these documents. Failing to do so could result in serious fines and penalties. Luckily, all of the signed documents can be correctly stored and accessible in Homebase, so you won’t have to worry about making an error.
Barzotto
Marko Sotto
Owner at Barzotto
Step 3: Introduce your new hire to your team
It’s important that employees feel comfortable around coworkers as fast as possible. Your existing workers will play a crucial role in displaying company culture and policies, and the more your new hire feels welcome and a part of your team, the higher chance you have of increasing employee engagement and retention.
However, it’s not practical to believe that your new hire will be comfortable enough to ask for everyone’s phone number. The Homebase free messaging app is a great solution to expediting team communication.
With the app, you can encourage your existing employees to reach out to your new employee to share tips, advice, and simply get to know their new teammate in an easy, streamlined way.
Your team can also send shout outs through the messaging app to encourage the new hire that they are acclimating nicely throughout their onboarding process.
Step 4: Gather feedback from your new employee
The last step in your “how to onboard employees” process should be to gather feedback. This way you can learn more about how you can improve your onboarding best practices and customize onboarding strategies based on what you learn.
You can do this easily by utilizing Homebase’s shift feedback feature on the online time clock. When the employee clocks out with the Homebase time clock, he or she will be prompted to select the number of stars they’d rate the specific shift.
Your employee can then add a note about the shift experience. It’s in this space that your new employee can say what he or she liked about the onboarding process. With this feedback you can make a note of what to keep doing, and what to improve.
Onboard employees the right way by making Homebase part of your new hire checklist. Get started managing your team more efficiently for free today.
Why is your employee onboarding process important?
The last step in your “how to onboard employees” process should be to gather feedback. This way you can learn more about how you can improve your onboarding best practices.
You can do this easily by utilizing Homebase’s shift feedback feature on the online time clock. When the employee clocks out with the Homebase time clock, he or she will be prompted to select the number of stars they’d rate the specific shift.
Your employee can then add a note about the shift experience. It’s in this space that your new employee can say what he or she liked about the onboarding process. With this feedback you can make a note of what to keep doing, and what to improve.
Onboard employees the right way by making Homebase part of your new hire checklist. Get started managing your team more efficiently for free today. You can even start with a free trial to get the full experience.
