Taking up a position: the keys to success in a crucial phase of the employee experience!

The hiring process is a key phase with crucial stakes for both the company and the new recruit. Everyone invests energy, time, and money, but too often this phase is poorly utilized by companies, managers, HR departments, and the candidate. The result:

• One in two recruitments fails after 12 months.

• 4% of new employees leave their position after the first day, 17% during the first week and 32% during the first month.

• 45% of resignations occur in the first year.

• 65% of new employees revisit job postings within 91 days of hiring.

So, how can we anticipate these pitfalls?

A successful new hire relies on a three-way collaboration between the candidate, the manager, and the HR department. Each must be involved in the process individually and interpersonally to build a solid foundation for a lasting collaboration. Here are some pragmatic and innovative ways for everyone to anticipate integration failures and ensure a successful new hire.

On the candidate side: preparation and dedication are the key words.

Prepare for your arrival.

As a candidate, you're about to join a professional adventure, a team, and a project that's already underway. The first key to successfully taking up your position lies in preparing for your arrival: learn about the company, its history, its founders, its leaders, its strategy, and its organization, both online and by asking your future manager for information. It's then important to prepare for your first day: find out in advance about work hours, the desired attire, and your arrival schedule.

Redouble your efforts the first few days.

With exponential amounts of information to integrate, names to memorize, spaces to locate, and organization to understand, familiarizing yourself with a new work environment is complex and requires extreme investment and concentration on your part. Work on your attitude: be curious, open, and don't hesitate to reintroduce yourself at each interview with one of your new colleagues and ask them questions! First impressions often determine what happens next, so you will be expected to listen attentively, be very curious, and be respectful of the established order.

Build lasting connections.

Connect with your manager and team. Leave your coffee and lunch breaks free to spend time with them and get to know them more informally. Ask each person for a one-on-one to understand their role within the organization, its challenges, achievements, and goals.

Prepare your storytelling in advance: how will you tell your story to make the best impression? You can adapt your speech based on the four professional personality types: analyst, controller, dreamer, persuader - and your hierarchical or organizational relationship with each interlocutor.

Capitalize on training.

Most companies have an onboarding program, which consists of a number of actions to facilitate the arrival of a new employee within the company.

Don't neglect this period, which will allow you to acquire important knowledge about the company, its culture, its values and its strategy on the one hand, its HR policy / employer brand on the other hand, but also more operational elements on what is expected of you very concretely. A set of extremely useful tools that will allow you to approach your new position with all the cards in hand.

Invest in your position deeply.

When you arrive, review with your manager the contents of your job description, your objectives, and what they expect from you during your first few weeks. This will allow you to focus your interactions and information gathering towards this objective from the start.

Don't hesitate to inquire about your predecessor's accomplishments, any areas where you may have been lacking, and current challenges from the perspective of the company, your manager, and your team. All of this formal and subjective data will help you prioritize and clarify your actions, express yourself authentically, and achieve an effective and well-received start to your mission, which will give you confidence for the future.

Manager side: give time and space to the new arrival.

Prepare the “operational” arrival of the new employee.

One of the keys to successfully integrating a new employee is to provide them with a reassuring and motivating environment. This obviously involves:

• Provide him with all the logistical information in advance: arrival time, map and route to the premises, dress code, program for the first day.

• Assign him an office or workspace.

• Anticipate the implementation of all the logistics: computer, professional telephone, identifiers for office tools, landline telephone, access badge, canteen badge and coffee machine: in short, everything that will allow the employee to be quickly independent from the first day.

• Organize the first day with key moments: welcome breakfast, presentation of the premises, presentation of the team, provision of documentation, etc.

Give your new recruit the time they need.

Integrating a new employee takes time and you will need to organize the first few weeks of their integration in such a way as to put them in the ideal position to carry out their mission successfully: schedule meetings and trips with their key contacts, organize regular progress updates, ensure that they fully understand the issues, validate their priority missions and formalize the first deliverables and expected KPIs.

This is a key moment in building your relationship and how you work together: take advantage of it to build connections and establish solid processes, organization and trust.

Manage the tempo of the trial period.

The first few months are crucial, as they allow both parties to test the validity of their collaboration. As a manager, you must organize this period in such a way as to give your recruit every opportunity to express their potential, find their place within the team, offer a surprising report, relevant areas for improvement, and achieve promising initial deliverables.

From an interpersonal perspective, you need to understand their personality, strengths, and weaknesses so that you don't have any unpleasant surprises once the candidate has been confirmed for their role. Your relationship should already be strong enough for you to be confident about the suitability of the recruitment process.

HR side: focus on the employee experience.

Provide a clear vision of the onboarding process to all parties.

As HR, you're here to help smooth the way for this new collaboration to be seamless in every way and ensure its success and sustainability. For you, this involves formalizing an onboarding process for each new employee, which will be communicated to them and their manager before they even arrive.

This process details the different stages of taking up the position and integrating the new arrival in order to eliminate as much as possible the risks of tension and failure.

The stakes are indeed enormous for the company from a human and financial point of view:

• A failed onboarding costs an average of 7,000 euros.

• Cost of turnover: between 100 and 300% of the employee's salary.

• A perfect onboarding consists of more than 150 tasks.

• 82% of companies do not feel ready when it comes to welcoming a new recruit.

• 80% of new hires decide to stay with the company within the first 6 months.

• It takes an average of 6 to 8 months for a new employee to be fully operational.

Source: Workelo white paper “Methodology for a reinvented onboarding experience”

It is therefore up to HR departments to ensure the best possible coordination during a candidate's integration, well beyond the first few days within the company. The best onboarding methods have a process that lasts three to six months, or even up to 12 months, including important key milestones that must be formalized.

Digitize onboarding to save time and increase efficiency.

Software like Workelo now allows HR departments to bring together as many steps of the onboarding process as possible on a digital platform and maximize its efficiency thanks to real-time monitoring and reporting tools.

It is thus possible to provide new recruits with administrative documents, a welcome kit, documents to read, tasks to complete, training and e-learning courses, key meetings or events, management and HR milestone meetings, etc. via a digital dashboard.

Providing everyone with a clear overview, such a platform optimizes, reassures, frames and maximizes the chances of success in taking up a position.

Let's take a look at the startups and pure players who are competing in ingenuity to offer atypical career paths for new recruits: good ideas to put candidates in the right frame of mind, integrate them more quickly and retain talent!

• Sponsor – Each new employee is assigned a “buddy”. This person is responsible for taking them under their wing and supporting them through their integration.

• Breakfast with the Boss – This is an hour between new hires and the CEO to learn more about the company and ask questions.

• Newbies' Tea Party – a tea party featuring all the new faces.

• Live my life – share a working day with another member of the company to discover their job.

• Intergation Days - a course consisting of sports challenges, games, discovery of projects, networking with teams.

The success of the job placement therefore depends on the involvement of all stakeholders: candidate, manager, and HR department. Everyone must invest time, rigor, energy, demonstrate curiosity, involvement, and assertiveness, in an implicit contract of transparency, throughout the integration process.

It is therefore extremely important for everyone to keep in mind the timeline, milestones, and expected objectives to align their actions and expectations. Behavioral sciences, digital transformation, and HR innovations are rapidly developing within companies to fuel this key stage of the employee experience.