Onboarding or Orientation?

Does your organization welcome new hires with onboarding or orientation? Step Up Recruiting strongly recommends onboarding, and can help you expand your support for new hires from orientation to a full onboarding experience.

What’s the difference?

Orientation is the traditional new hire support services, and is the same for every new employee from janitor to executive. This is the progression your company uses to walk your newest employees through the paperwork of enrolling in payroll, benefits, and then gives them a tour of the facilities, an overview of the corporate culture, mission, values, and expectations as a new employee. It can include a follow-up interview or two, to ensure the employee has settled in, and to see if they have any unanswered questions. Orientation usually takes a few days, up to a week or so.

It’s a universal tool for HR because it delivers critical information efficiently and is designed to ensure that every new hire gets a consistent, coordinated, and welcoming message and is ready to begin their new job with a solid understanding of the company they now work for.

Onboarding includes orientation, but is more extensive, and lasts from three to six months. The focus of onboarding is on building engagement and fostering fit over the long term, to increase overall productivity and retention. Orientation is an important beginning for the onboarding process, but onboarding is focused on integrating the new hire into not just the position they were hired to fill, but into the team and the company as well.

Instead of a one-way, high volume flow of information in the classroom style of the standard orientation model, an onboarding model has information flowing through several channels, which can still include the orientation classroom, but also adds information delivered by teams, departments, and allows feedback both to and from the new hire at every point. This two-way feedback allows the new hire to ask questions as they come up and gives the associate the ability to respond and adjust as needed to suggestions for improvement. This promotes a faster, better fit on both sides. The onboarding process is customized to the exact department, team, and position the new hire is entering and is designed to deliver information in small, easily absorbed amounts as it is needed, fostering confidence and steadily increasing productivity, as well as providing more guidance in everything from work flow to policy.

The onboarding process increases retention, meeting long-term HR goals, and it improves overall performance and productivity over the first six months for the new hire and their team. Both are important benefits for your organization.

Want more information about how to develop an onboarding program, or how Step Up Recruiting can support and enhance your onboarding process? Contact us today!