5 Tips for Creating A Positive Employee Experience

First impressions last! A great recruitment-and-onboarding experience gets new employees started off the right foot and makes them feel positive about their job too.

Both recruitment and onboarding together are what form the candidate’s first impression and the two are tightly interconnected.  Well, clearly you have to start with attracting and recruiting the right candidates… but even superstar hires, will not succeed without effective onboarding. Here are 5 tips that I’ve compiled for you based on our involvement with 100s of companies. These tips belong to various parts of the entire candidate journey:  From the moment they see your ad (or you’ve approached them) and until they’ve finished their first week in your company. All this leads to a positive employee experience.

Area #1 – The Job Advert & Application Form

Let’s start at the attraction stage and the candidate’s first experience with applying to one of your jobs – the first step in the candidate journey.

• The Job Ad
  • The job ad on your career site works on mobiles, professionally written, thoughtful enough to contain info that helps the candidate understand the job requirements, the environment and the culture and how they can grow (if any) in your organisation through this job.
• Application Form
  • The application form works on mobiles
  • It’s smart, not too long, and suitable for applicants trying to apply from a mobile device
  • It’s intelligent and genuine meaning it acknowledges emails as soon as applicants apply
• Your Career site
  • The rest of your career site should be designed in a clever way and interesting way reflecting your brand, industry and your audience – it needs to connect with your audience and speak their language and it definitely needs to be responsive and work on all devices.

Area #2 – The Recruitment Experience

• Don’t ghost them
• Use automation to send interview reminders
• Keep them in the loop throughout the entire process
• Bring in the right people at the right time
• Explain what the job is about
• Explain what it takes to succeed in the role
• Explain the challenges
• Explain what they would gain from being in the role

Area #3 – The Digital Onboarding Pack

• Digital Signing
• Online & Smart forms
• Online Tax Dec Form
• Integration with ATO (submit in one click)
• Online Super choice
• Bank Forms… etc.
• Induction Videos
• Welcome Video from Hiring Manager/CEO

During the onboarding phase, I believe that eliminating any papers from the onboarding process has a significant positive impact on the employee experience.  Printing and scanning is a very daunting and outdated experience that any candidate welcomes not having to go through.  Let alone that it reduces the dropoff rate and saves employers lots of money… and I don’t want to mention that Australian and American companies alone… every 10 years, could consume trees to the tune of the number of trees in the yellow stone park!  Just on onboarding!

Can you imagine that?  That’s roughly:  30,000,000 x 10 x 100 = 30,000,000,000 = 30 Billion sheets of paper.  Based on 150 million workforces across the USA and Australia, with 20% / year turn over movement, over 10 years, and; based on 8,300 sheets of paper per tree.  So this brings the total number of trees required to be cut down to about 4 million trees.

1,000 companies could consume 3,000 trees each year, which is equivalent to 15,000 trees over 5 years, which in turn, is equivalent to consuming the entire tree population of Centennial Park in Sydney, a very known park that’s the largest park in the inner Sydney area.

Area #4 – Communication Automation

• Don’t ghost them, again (being too busy is not an excuse – sales people don’t ghost their prospects!)
• Use automations to
  • Sales funnel vs. Recruitment funnel
  • Welcome and look forward to…
  • -60, -30, -20, -10, -1… etc.
  • Remind the Hiring manager to call them
  • Do something nice for them

Area #5 – The Entitlements

New hires want to add value ASAP, so not having the tools and training that enable them to do so… can create negative anxiety about their job security and therefore leaves a very bad moment of employee experience.

So how can technology helps in making sure that all the tools and resources the new employee needs for their jobs are available for them and at the right time!

So you need a checklist showing all the assets and resources the new hire will need and this list needs to be shared by all the stakeholders that responsible for fulfilment as well as the hiring manager and HR.

Car, Phone, Uniform, Laptop, IT System Accounts… etc.

Requisition form → Procurement/IT → Into the Contract

All entitlements and requirements for the role get approved by management during the job requisition and this information gets automatically shared with all the stakeholders with full visibility.

Key Takeaways

There’s 5 tips to create a positive employee experience!

Armed with these insights I hope you are able to apply even one to your business. Your employees will thank you and you’ll be thanking yourself. Employees are the backbone of almost all businesses so keeping them happy is essential. A positive employee experience from the day they start makes it much more likely they’ll continue to add value over time. By automating your systems and processes, using software, you can greatly improve the effectiveness of your efforts. And… save time, money and even, trees!