Onboarding New Hires the MCPc Way
Posted on Fri, Jun 29, 2012 @ 08:37 AM
As a Recruitment Coordinator, onboarding makes up a significant portion of my responsibilities. Many of us have experienced in our careers an onboarding that’s rushed, disorganized and more disorienting than orienting. We try to do things a bit different at MCPc.
Effective onboarding is essential to MCPc, a company that believes in the importance of smoothly transitioning in a new employee. For this reason, MCPc tries to make the process structured, unrushed and clear for the associate.
An onboarding schedule is typically stretched over several days. It starts with an email to the new hire before their first day that provides their orientation schedule. The schedule is titled and includes the orientation leaders name, title, phone number, timeframe scheduled and what the leader will be covering. The number of sessions conducted will vary based on a person’s role in our organization. We offer a chance to meet some of the people they will be working with face-to face, give them an office tour, set up lunch with their manager and make sure they have some free time to just plain get comfortable.
We see several benefits to this ordered, steady approach:
- There is an opportunity to soak in the corporate culture.
- Stretching out onboarding allows a new associate to absorb all the information they are given without getting overwhelmed.
- It allows them down time to relax, organize their thoughts and prepare for other sessions they need to attend.
- It also allows them an opportunity to voice concerns, ask questions and ask colleagues about anything from benefits to discovering our partners to learning more about other departments.
New hires generally have a lot of basic questions: how to get into the building, who to ask for, what to bring, etc. The email I send out contains all of this information and more.
Recently, a new section called ‘Corporate FAQ’s’ has been added to our orientation book. This gives our new associates a chance to know where to go to lunch (There’s so many walkable options near our downtown Cleveland HQ!), how to use our office services, what the emergency procedures are and so on without having to do extensive research.
Done right, an onboarding process gives a new hire confidence in a new setting and a comprehensive picture of the company. And from the organization’s perspective, a comfortable, confident employee should translate into ROI.
ROI with any new hire is critical. Obviously, the sooner an employee becomes a positive contributor to the goals of the organization, the better. I sincerely think we do everything we can to position our new hires for success through our onboarding process. This approach not only allows us to be a company invested in its employees, but demonstrates that we want to engage them fully from the first day forward.
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Morgan Zuiderveld is Recruitment Coordinator at MCPc. She is part of the human resources department and is in charge of onboarding talent for our Cleveland headquarters and regional offices across the country. Connect with Morgan on LinkedIn.
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image credit: Robert S. Donovan