Stuart Creswick, the People Services Operations Manager at Aspris, joined our Director of Strategic Development, Giles Heckstall-Smith on a webinar to discuss how Aspris manage their Onboarding (and pre-boarding). Read our summary of the session - or watch the full session below!
1 - The biggest challenges during onboarding
2 - Are references worth the investment?
3 - How Aspris mastered onboarding
4 - How do you manage competition?
5 - How to handle drop-off at the offer stage
6 - Keeping candidates warm during onboarding stage
Did you know that 45% of people are lost between the point of offer and starting a new job? (JobBrain 2023)
Onboarding is such a critical part of the recruitment process. After all of the hard work of attracting candidates, assessing them, keeping them excited and nurtured through the whole process, it can be costly and frustrating to see candidates drop off at that final stage.
The biggest challenges during onboarding
The webinar attendees were asked to submit their main pain-points during the onboarding of new hires. Some of the biggest obstacles attendees noted were also some of the more obvious and common ones:
- Right-to-work checks
- References
- Communicating with candidates and answering questions
- Time commitment
It’s very easy for people to become disengaged with onboarding. A central onboarding function can make all the difference, with automated reminders, a welcome hub that keeps candidates warm, keeping all of the references in one place, and increase visibility through the full process.
Are references worth the investment?
Stuart: We hear from colleagues that references are often limited in the amount of information that is sent over. Sometimes a reference will just have a start and end date! These in themselves are still useful and worthwhile. Especially in the care sector, it’s easy for a candidate to exaggerate their work experience, so having that confirmed by a referee can still be useful!
How Aspris mastered their onboarding process
Stuart: Resourcing and onboarding can be quite transactional – especially in the care sector. We currently onboard about 2,000-2,500 employees per year. We use Jobtrain as our applicant tracking system and when we first signed up with Jobtrain our core objective was to make onboarding as easy-to-use for candidates as possible.
We run various workshop sessions with our Hiring Managers on how to use the system, sharing good practice so that they can carry our internal philosophy into how they interact with our candidates. We use the reporting functionality in Jobtrain so we can see common bottlenecks and take necessary action, which is really easy to use because it’s immediately accessible from the dashboard. We start that analytical process before entering candidates into the offer stage, so we all have an awareness of where the painpoints will be.
Our other focus was on lag. Getting in touch with a candidate straight away sets a precedent for them to follow. It takes us 24 hours at most to send a contract out to someone who has previously received an offer.
We also have a call with the candidate to put a friendly voice to the organisation. That call is careful, soft, and encouraging, but with a strong focus on transparency. We lay out what the next steps look like.
How do you manage competition?
The Care Sector’s biggest competitor is retail. Our candidates know that it’s easier to get a job in – say – Tesco, than it is to work in care! To try to mitigate that, we focus on communication from the get-go.
We’re upfront and make sure the candidate is really clear from the beginning about the amount of checks and work that we’ll need to do. We flag that right-to-work and DBS checks are there for safeguarding purposes, so they understand why these perceived hurdles are necessary.
How to handle drop-off at the offer stage
Attendees were asked to fill out a poll, answering what percentage of their new hires dropped out of the process after they’ve been offered a job. The results are below:
0-10 – 60%
11-20 – 30%
21-30 – 10%
Right-to-work and DBS checks are generally where candidates will drop out.
Integrating your DBS and right-to-work (RTW) checks into your applicant tracking system makes the tricky RTW process much smoother. One of the more positive changes that came out of Covid was that manual RTW checks were transformed into digital-certified checks. Now you no longer have to physically see a new hire’s passport, you can integrate this technology into your ATS.
What this means is you just need to invite a candidate to undertake the check. It takes the candidates a few minutes online, and then it’s all taken care of!
Keeping candidates warm during onboarding
The human connection is really important. Relying on an ATS to handle all of your typical manual processes (like RTW checks!) gives your team more time to talk to candidates and keep them moving through your hiring funnel. A phone call after offer goes a long way!
A poll was run in the webinar, asking attendees if they directly engage with candidates after offering a job. The results are below!
Do you engage with new hires ahead of their first day once they’ve signed the contract and completed all the paperwork?
Yes – 83%
No – 17%
We also had a couple of great comments explaining further!
“I do a welcome call within a few days of their offer paperwork being returned, send their joining instructions out a few weeks before they join! And if they have a long notice period I check in with them.”
“We have an Engagement Team who's focus is to support new colleagues during their first 12 weeks - starting within 24 hours of a successful interview and bridging the gap between onboarding process/checks to starting paid work.”
“I typically get in touch about a week before start date. I encourage managers to get in touch with them but engagement from managers is quite mixed.”
Giles: One of the things we recommend to our clients is creating a Hiring Manager Charter! Lay out best practice in a formal document for colleagues so they can follow it, and they know what a good onboarding process looks like!
