How do you know you’ve covered everything you need to do with a recently hired employee? You can read guides, take lessons and buy onboarding platforms, but at some point, your process needs to be unique; it’s up to you to make sure you have touched on everything so you can move on from each step without having to think about it. Make sure you don’t miss a step in the onboarding process by creating a new hire process flowchart. It will have all of the steps you need to make sure your latest new hire ends up as one of your best. What steps go into your flow chart? Glad you asked. 

Step 1: Integrate it into Your Hiring Process

This might sound like a no-brainer, but you’d surprised how many companies don’t think about their onboarding procedures until after they hire their first employee. Before you hire someone, make sure you’ve included onboarding. When you build the hiring process with onboarding as an integral facet, it makes it easier to file the necessary paperwork. Onboarding is such an essential part of the hiring process that the University of California Riverside, for example, includes it in their new hire process flow chart. 

Step 2: Take Care of the Legal Stuff Ahead of Time

No one wants to wade through all the forms and minutiae to make sure a new hire’s legally allowed to work for you, but it’s a necessary part of any new hire process flow chart. There’s no way around it, but there are a few things you can do to make sure the process is as painless as possible. One thing you can do is ensure your onboarding forms are covered before day one, before the employee ever enters the office. It’s what as many as 83% of companies in a recent SHRM poll do, and for good reason. When all of these things are taken care of, you’re free to move on to more important matters, like…

Step 3: Introduce them to the Company

Clearly, onboarding is an essential part of the new hire process flow chart if we’ve only just arrived at the company introduction. This doesn’t make it any less important, however; a good new hire process flow chart puts a big emphasis on that first impression. When you properly introduce your employee to the company, you get better employees. According to the SHRM survey, 66% of companies with an onboarding process more successfully assimilate new employees into their employee culture. It doesn’t seem like that big a deal, but trust us when we say you want this as part of your flowchart.

Step 4: Plan for a Whole Week

Chances are your employee won’t know everything about your company after their first day. So when you’re planning out your new hire process flow chart, make sure you factor in a full introduction schedule, based around the first week. What’s more, make sure you’re not letting employees sit idly for too long. Maynard Webb, Chairman at Yahoo, suggests managers keep tabs on new employees regularly during their first week.

“Take 20 minutes every day for the first week or two to investigate how it is going. You can instantly tell if someone is struggling or succeeding and iterate to make things work more smoothly. Always ask, ‘What do you need from me?’”

Step 5: The Rest of the First Year

When writing up your new hire process flowchart, don’t write “and then we’re done” anywhere on it. Onboarding, the process of teaching an employee the intricacies of the job they’ve been hired to do spans far longer than just that first week. Since employees who went through a structured onboarding program are 58% more likely to stick with a company for more than three years, you can plan milestones and yearly goals with confidence. So give your new hires something to aim for on a regular basis, whether it’s being more productive or getting a big project off the ground before the end of their first year.

There’s more to onboarding than these five steps, especially when you start breaking down each of these steps into all the questions they bring (just how do you introduce an employee to your company culture, anyway?). But flow charts aren’t about details; they’re about letting your employees know that you have a plan for their arrival, and that you care enough to make sure they do become the excellent employees they want to be.

Bio: Christine Marino

Christine is the Chief Revenue Officer of Click Boarding, LLC, a company that offers employee onboarding software and solutions. She is responsible for the sales, marketing and business development strategies. Leveraging her 18+ years of experience in the Human Capital Management space, Christine drives company growth through strategic partner relationships as well new customer acquisitions across the small to large enterprise markets.