Automated Employee Onboarding Process: What Is It and How Is It Done?

Recurring employee onboarding tasks, including documentation, reminders, and answering frequent queries, appear as an expanded list of duties when you're the HR manager of a developing company. Inconsistencies start to emerge in the race to save time, and your new employee experience suffers as a result.

But there is a better method to streamline these processes—ensuring effectiveness, quality, and a more pleasant onboarding experience for new employees. The automated onboarding procedures are a more standardized, quick, and practical approach to welcoming and keeping new staff.

Below is a description of automated employee onboarding, its benefits, and how you can do it. Read on to find out.

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What is "Automated Onboarding?"

Using software to carry out some employee onboarding tasks^[1] and activities with little to no help from your HR team is known as onboarding automation.

Automation can be used for repetitive tasks, like sending emails, updating statuses, and routing data. Inputting or relocating data, issuing notifications, creating papers, and obtaining signatures are further tasks you can automate.

Using self-service portals, which enable new hires to help themselves, is another type of onboarding automation. These portals can view information like corporate policies or benefit enrollment manuals and contact HR with requests.

Onboarding automation offers seamless workflows between the recruiting, hiring, and onboarding processes and enhances the new hire experience.

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Manual onboarding vs Automated onboarding

Manual employee onboarding severely slows down the time it takes a new hire to become productive. Here are some other difficulties encountered during manual onboarding:

• Onboarding programs with gaps
• Fewer controls on the recruiting and employment processes
• Confusion in the process of interdepartmental communication
• Lengthy and prone to error process

Conversely, automated onboarding involves less human-to-human engagement than manual onboarding, so users don't speak directly with teams or business representatives.

An automated employee onboarding process is conceivable through various apps, platforms, services, and strategies.

Additionally, automation significantly makes onboarding new users more effortless as your product expands and the number of users rises.

And while receiving favorable customer feedback is quite essential for organizations, you might want to think about redesigning the user onboarding procedure because it can give you plenty of great feedback.

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How to Automate the Employee Onboarding Process?

Discover the actions you'll need to take to set up the employee onboarding workflow automation for your business:

Sketch Out the Ideal Approach and Your Present Workflow.

Mapping your team's tasks to accomplish a successful onboarding is the first step in automating your employee onboarding workflow.

You must include all the departments involved, their contact points with the HR staff, their respective responsibilities, and the tasks needed for the onboarding process. To include best practices into your workflow, it's a good idea to develop a checklist with them.

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During Intake

Identify the circumstances that will initiate your onboarding cycle. You must either set up a start form or a trigger that will initiate the onboarding process to begin. You can achieve this in one of two ways:

1. Create an online form with all the data you require to begin the onboarding process, and manually enter the details of the new hire into a card that will serve as their representative throughout the process.
2. Integrate the hiring and recruitment process with the employee onboarding procedure to obtain new hire data automatically. With the right software, you can separate process organization and information sharing for a smooth transition.

Either way, you must create a start form to launch your process.

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Create the Stages of the Employee Onboarding Workflow

Every process has steps that must be taken to be completed. Some applications allow you to arrange and visually build those phases; each column in the workflow corresponds to a particular stage of the procedure.

You can include due dates, documents, assignees, and various other information in your workflow's phases since different fields show as the card, which serves as a visual representation of the recruit, progresses through the columns.

To ensure that your team doesn't skip any crucial phases, you can even designate required fields and establish standards for your process.

Starting with the employee onboarding template, you can modify the workflow by adding or removing stages and changing the fields of each.

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Connect Your Onboarding to Other Applications

You can streamline the employee onboarding process using your software's integration features. It may be integrated with employee databases, HCM, ERPs, and payroll systems.

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Benefits of Automating the Onboarding Process

An automated employee onboarding process has many benefits that enhance the employee experience. They include:

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Accelerated Delivery Time

When you need new employees to fill out multiple documents, many of which will likely remain in a folder for days or weeks, it doesn't make a good first impression.

Most employees dislike corporate bureaucracy, so there must be as few procedures as possible involved in enrolling new employees.

An automated system enables you to minimize the required forms and efficiently route them between departments, leading to quicker onboarding.

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Easier Staff Management

Multiple data entry is a frequent trait of any inefficient business process. It requires time and raises the possibility of inaccuracy. Automating onboarding allows you to manage all employee paperwork and data in one location.

It provides total visibility into the status of any new onboarding program for companies and employees. A centralized data repository allows HR teams to make well-informed judgments when choosing new candidates and obtain insights into the onboarding process of new hires.

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Reduced Redundancy

New employees frequently feel as though they are repeatedly filling out the same information to the point that they become bored and unmotivated before they even begin.

Similar to this, training programs are frequently disjointed and irrelevant. New hires may find themselves learning stuff they already know in training sessions.

By automating onboarding, you'll better equip yourself to consider their particular wants and traits from the beginning.

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Key Takeaways

New hires typically take one to two years to attain their peak output. That's way too long in the fast-paced world of today. However, when someone joins a company for the first time, they frequently exhibit greater motivation and enthusiasm.

The first few months are crucial because of this. The decisions you make now, whether they include research, training, or orientation, will significantly influence your employee experience.

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[1] https://hr.uw.edu/talent/onboarding/new-employee-onboarding/