Strong Onboarding Is Essential to Engage New Marketing Hires

By Adrian Robinson, Toronto Marketing Recruiter

Recruiting marketing candidates involves so much more than just finding talent. You have to attract the right people, and once you get them, you need a successful onboarding process to engage them from day one.

The ability for companies to embrace new hires immediately, immerse them in company culture and help them thrive is a key factor in being able to keep them for the long term. A poor onboarding experience can kill all the excitement and energy a new hire has coming out of the recruitment process.

The issue? Companies are failing to invest in creating an engaging onboarding experience.

The 3 Key Issues with Onboarding

A recent study by Kronos has found that a poor onboarding experience can disengage new hires. They found three key issues that need to be addressed:

• Onboarding is broken: 76% of HR leaders believe onboarding is underutilized. It’s not prioritized, and not enough time is dedicated to the process.
• Onboarding is much more than employee orientation: There is too much focus on rules, regulations, and paperwork. More time needs to be spent on strategic activities to maximize new hires’ abilities from day one.
• More accountability is needed from companies: 55% of companies say they don’t measure onboarding. Failure to measure the success of new hire training makes it difficult to identify issues and areas that require more attention.

How to Maximize the Effectiveness of Onboarding and Engage New Hires

Here are three ways to improve your onboarding program:

• Prioritize onboarding: Onboarding needs to be a priority. It’s an extension of the recruiting process. However, only 30% of companies intend to increase their onboarding budget in 2018.
• Extend the onboarding process: The onboarding process takes time. More than a third of companies only spend a few hours to a week on it. 24% have a monthly onboarding plan. And only 10% have a yearlong plan in place. The more you invest in new hires upfront, through onboarding, the more engaged they will become.
• Focus more on culture: We all know that filling out paperwork, setting up workstations, and other orientation tasks are necessary, but it shouldn’t be the focal point of onboarding. Most companies only dedicate about 30% of onboarding to culture. With culture being a huge reason employees thrive and stay with a company, more emphasis is needed.

More Marketing Recruiting Tips

Job Interview Questions to Find Exceptional Marketing Talent

5 Tips to Attract Out of Town Marketing Talent

How to Use Email to Recruit Marketing Candidates

IQ PARTNERS is an Executive Search & Recruitment firm supporting clients across the country. We help companies hire better, hire less & retain more. We have specialist teams of recruiters in Technology (IT), Accounting and Finance, Consumer Goods, eCommerce and Retail, Financial Services and Insurance, Startup, B2B and Industrial, Operations and HR, Professional Services and Legal, Media, Digital and Marketing, Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences, Emerging Technology and Telecom, and  Sales. IQ PARTNERS has its head office in Toronto and operates internationally via Aravati Global Search Network. Click here to view current job openings and to register with us.