How to get onboarding and compliance right

1 - What is onboarding and compliance?
2 - Complete onboarding processes online
3 - How to integrate onboarding and compliance into your ATS
4 - Keep candidates well-informed
5 - Use your ATS to keep new hires engaged

Streamlined onboarding and compliance is key so you and your new employee can get off to the best possible start. The Onboarding stage of the recruitment process is an exciting time, but often one fraught with danger. Ensuring compliance such as Right to Work checks are managed properly and legally is vital to getting it right. UK businesses lost almost £50 million in civil penalties for illegal working from 2015 to 2016 (Onfido) is just one statistic that should be a stark warning to us all. 

As well as compliance, providing a simple and engaging process for new hires can be the difference between them staying in the job long term or leaving shortly after starting. In fact, according to Brandon Hall Group, new hire retention can be improved by 82% with good onboarding.  

Coinciding with the launch of our brand-new enhanced onboarding and compliance feature, here are our top tips to running a foolproof onboarding and compliance process.

What is onboarding and compliance? 

Onboarding in recruitment is the process of bringing a new employee into your organisation. It’s sometimes called pre-boarding.

There are two focuses for Onboarding – first, there’s the engagement with the new hire to keep up the momentum and excitement before their first day. Second, there are the legal and compliance elements, such as right-to-work (RTW) checks, DBS Checks and Disclosure Scotland. 

Complete onboarding processes online 

Onboarding processes can and should be completed online to reduce time to onboard and increase visibility. These are things like references requests, sending offer letters & contracts (with the ability to accept them online) as well as compliance checks like RTW and DBS Checks. Completing all of this online is just as important now as it was at the height of the pandemic and lockdowns.

Snippets of our enhanced onboarding functionality

Integrate onboarding and compliance into your ATS 

Many organisations use third parties for compliance checks such as First Advantage for Right to Work or DBS checks – integrate these systems into your applicant tracking system for full new starter transparency.  

Use an onboarding system that provides an overview of progress throughout each onboarding phase and for each new hire.

Our own Onboarding and Compliance hub puts you in control to start and access a variety of onboarding elements (compliance, references, etc) – and crucially have access to insights and analysis against each stage of the process for each new hire. 

Make sure candidates are well informed 

An Onboarding and Compliance feature that’s part of your ATS should include a dashboard for candidates too. For candidates, this can often seem like a complicated process, so making sure it’s clear they know what’s required from them is crucial to getting them onboard as quickly as possible.

Our onboarding hub for candidates gives them clear visibility of progress, so even for the most complex of onboarding processes, candidates will always know where everything’s up to. From their onboarding portal, they can even raise real-time queries with the recruitment team if any questions arise.

Use your ATS to keep new hires engaged  

Keeping up the excitement with new hires is just as important as finding, hiring, and taking them through the onboarding and compliance phase. 

Going through a compliance stage that includes elements like DBS Checks will naturally add time to the process. The danger is that new hires could then lose interest before they’ve even started and quit the process, putting you back to square one and a few thousand pounds wasted when the entire recruitment process must be started all over again!

That’s why we’re huge advocates of a Welcome Hub, like the one we provide to our clients. It’s a dedicated online hub where you choose the types of content that will engage your new hires, such as video interviews with the team they’ll be working with, contact details for their manager, where they can get lunch on their first day – the choice is entirely yours.

In summary 

• Bring onboarding processes online 
• Integrate onboarding and compliance into your ATS 
• Keep candidates well informed with their own onboarding dashboard 
• Use a welcome hub to keep new hires engaged