We’ve all had a big breakup in our lives – first love, last love, alcohol, or that one alcohol you’ll never drink again. For me, I broke up with processed foods and carbs (and Jager). New hire onboarding exists because you broke up with an employee and they broke up with their previous employer. I’ve also completely broken up with dead trees.
It’s 2021 – Ditch the Paper
In a year where even my grandma knows how to use a QR code, there are still thousands of businesses using paper to run their processes. I get it, not everything can be cost effectively digitized, but let’s chat payroll for a minute.
Paperless New Hire Onboarding
When you hire a new employee, you have an employee handbook, a W4, I9, offer letter, a direct deposit form, and perhaps additional forms.
When I owned my pizzeria we had to get a DHHS form where the employee would acknowledge the requirements to offer a sanitary workspace.
That’s 10 pieces of paper if you don’t print out the handbook plus another 2 pages for the actual application.
Plus, you have to stop what you’re doing, chase down the employee, wrangle the information, get them to sign, then you need to key that information into your payroll system and often your point of sale.
There’s gotta be a better way right?
One-Click Electronic Onboarding
Every payroll system should offer a seamless electronic on-boarding experience for the employer and the employee. As you consider which companies to partner with, here are a few must have features:
- Customizing Templates
No one has the same documents. Sure, we all have similar required documentation to board an employee for our state compliance, but businesses are all different. You could need Serve Safe info, Health forms, handbooks, ethics statements, etc. Your onboarding system should allow you to insert those documents. - Minimal Information Required
The ENTIRE goal of electronic onboarding of new employees is to streamline and speed up the process of getting new hire paperwork completed. Some systems – like ADP – require that you have the new hire’s social security number to even send the invite. Seems kind of crazy right? You should only need an email address and a name. The rest should be able to be entered by the employee. - Mobile Responsive
My data shows that 82% of new hire onboarding is completed by the employee on a mobile device. That 18% is most likely because the onboarding system didn’t work correctly on mobile. If your system looks like garbage on mobile or isn’t easy to use on mobile, you’re going to start off on the wrong foot with your prospective employee. And in this job market, speed and first impressions are paramount. - Integration & Single-Login
Your onboarding system should talk to your payroll system and vice versa. That means the same login, the same interface, and the new employees automatically populate into the payroll register.
There are a lot of other beneficial bells and whistles that you can leverage out of a good onboarding system, but these are the core basics.