How to Improve Your Onboarding Process and Find the Best Candidate for Your Company?

As a startup founder, you have a lot on your mind. You are trying to grow your business, gain new customers, and keep your employees happy. But one of the most important things you can do is find great new employees to keep your company growing.  In today’s tight labor market, it can be tough to find the fittest candidates.

When you find the right candidate, the first step is welcoming them well in the door. But it is not as easy as just posting a job and crossing your fingers. You need to find the best candidate and create an onboarding process that will set them up for success. You also need to find the best way to communicate with them and get them excited about the job.

Your first step to finding the right candidate is to plan your onboarding process. You should plan your onboarding process before you even start looking for candidates. That means you need to know what your goals are for finding the right person for the job. Are you looking to bring in an experienced leader or a skilled individual who can help you expand your operation?  

One of the best ways to plan your onboarding process is to create a roadmap. When you create a roadmap, you can think about your goals for finding the right candidate and the best way to communicate with them. You can also use your roadmap to evaluate candidates truly. If you can succeed in truly evaluating them, you do not have to worry about finding the right candidate even among hundreds of applications.  

So, you are wondering about how to create an onboarding roadmap. Do not worry! We will start step by step.

Think about your company's mission.

What do you want to achieve with your new employee? What are the core values you are looking for? What are the core competencies that they can encounter in your company?  

When it comes to the hiring process, you do not want to forget the most important thing—the company’s mission. You should not forget that you are hiring someone to join your team and help you to achieve your mission.

Think about the type of candidates you want to find.

Are you looking for an experienced leader or a skilled individual who can help you expand your operation? Once you have a better idea of what you want to find, you can create a roadmap to guide your search. This will help you think through the best way to communicate with potential candidates, the goals you want to achieve with them, and the core values you are looking for in your new hires.

Define the qualifications your candidates.

As a startup, you may be able to take on a lot of new hires at once. But as your business grows, you will need to specialize in certain areas. If you are looking to expand your operations, you will need to focus on finding the right leaders.  

Be clear about what you are offering to your candidates.

You should not forget that also candidates will evaluate your company during the interview process. So, you need to be clear about what you are offering your employees and why candidates should choose your company over others.  

You need to remember to talk about your company when you are hiring. Do not forget to share your mission, values, and goals with potential candidates. This will help them evaluate your company on a deeper level and determine if it is a good fit. You should also remember to share the process for hiring with candidates.  

Understand the different expectations of candidates

When it comes to the hiring process, it is also important to remember that every candidate has different expectations. You should reflect your company culture and values in the right way for them. For example, the expectations of software developers could differ from the expectations of a salesperson. It is normal.  

Be planned and organized

In a scenario where all goes well for both you and your candidate, your candidate will be very enthusiastic and excited about the next step. If you want to provide a smooth onboarding process for your candidates and not lose their excitement, you should run an organized onboarding process as much as possible. We mentioned how important it is to plan every step of your process.

Your candidates will want to know what awaits them in the next step. To ensure that your candidates can easily adapt and complete the onboarding process without any confusion, you should inform them about the flow of your onboarding process. If possible, it would be extremely useful to present the whole roadmap to them and send it as a document. Thus, they can follow their stages instantly and complete the process completely.

Create custom onboarding flows for each department

The onboarding processes of each department may differ at certain points. For example, you may need to follow more detailed training processes when involving a candidate in departments where you expect them to have more technical skills. Also, in some cases, you may need to follow the candidates' onboarding process with the other department leaders. Therefore, working on a roadmap that you can follow together with your colleagues will make your job easier and will help your onboarding process not to be interrupted

Give and get feedback regularly

Your new employees are usually very eager to hear feedback. Until they get used to team dynamics, they may want to be confirmed and supported that they are doing something right. Sometimes, when they do not get enough feedback, they may act more passively, thinking that what they do may be wrong. However, we all want more proactive employees.

Therefore, you must offer your employees spaces where they can express themselves. Be as open with them as possible and do not hesitate to give positive feedback. If there is anything that you see as negative, you should express it to them in the most constructive way and support them to fix it. Being able to monitor and report these feedback meetings periodically, especially in the first months, provides you with very meaningful insights about your employees. It also helps you to improve your onboarding process. You should be able to list and analyze feedback regularly.

To sum up, the onboarding process is a collaborative process for both the employer and the hired person. The better you plan your onboarding process, the easier your new candidates can be involved in this process and the better they can open themselves to you. To evaluate your employee candidates most accurately you should strategically plan your onboarding process very well and be able to involve your candidate in this process as much as possible. In this process where mutual interaction is especially important, you should integrate the software that will make things easier for you in your HR processes.

Here we have compiled a few onboarding templates spreadsheets prepared by Retable's HR experts for you. You can customize these spreadsheet templates according to your needs on your Retable dashboard and easily integrate them into your onboarding processes.

• Interview Questions Spreadsheet
• Recruitment Planning Spreadsheet
• Applicant Tracking Spreadsheet
• Employee Onboarding Planning Spreadsheet
• Employee Directory Demographic Spreadsheet

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What about the most difficult steps in your onboarding processes? Let's share with us!

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