One of the other new buzwords besides "talent" is "onboarding." Onboarding is not only the new hire experience. It is everything that happens from the moment an offer letter is extended to the time your emplyoee is sufficiently indoctrinated into the organization and is competently productive. In other words, Andrew is correct when he says "the candidate’s understanding of you changes throughout the process (a very strong indicator of how likely they are to integrate when they join)" To create a successful recruiting experience in the eyes of the organization, the employee must be retained. Therefore, it is critical that the organization view the recruiting experience to last longer than day 1.
Onboarding should consist of the
- pre day 1 activities (preferably some sort of on-line pre-hire transfer of knowledge, policies and information),
- new hire process (how quickly do you get the employee the tools needed to work and how well do you orient him/er)
- Post day 1 activities (how do you continue to aclimate the employee in the first few months)
- post M1 and Q1 activities (how well do you begin the process for career development and job training)
Organizations should easily find that there is large ROI associated with quality onboarding primarily through decreased turnover in the first 18 months. I think I wrote about this once before, but you should remember that no ROI is useful unless you have first measured the current state benchmark to compare future results with. So as Andrw says "You should be looking at measuring at all stages, right into their first year. You need to track the changes over time."
