How to simplify employee onboarding

Onboarding new employees is expensive and time-consuming. According to a study by Glassdoor.com, getting a new employee onboarded and fully on-ramped can take as long as eight months; the simple administrative task of getting new employee provisioned in a Human Resource Information System like Workday can take 10 hours. At a large company, devoting so much time to this isn’t sustainable. What HR professionals are looking for is a way to bring all of hiring’s administrative tasks into a single system that allows both HR professionals and new hires to self-serve what they need.

For example, applicants for a particular job might come through an Applicant Tracking System like Greenhouse or Jobvite. When those applicants are hired, if systems aren’t integrated, their data (which already has been entered into the ATS) has to be manually entered into the HRIS and then inspected for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. HR also has to review employment documents to verify that the new employee has the legal right to work and has to begin an employee provisioning process to make sure she has the right equipment to do her job.

But what if that entire process could be automated? Then the new hire could spend less of her onboarding period filling out paperwork and more time learning about her new job. If the HRIS and the ATS were integrated, then once an role closes with a new hire in the tracking system, that data could automatically populate in Workday, eliminating the need for data entry. An integration with the E-Verify system in the United States could establish the legal right to work very quickly and the closing of a role in the ATS could trigger a series of events that will provision their desks, their computer equipment, their email accounts, among other things; this makes employee onboarding a lot more pleasant and efficient. This integration could also make the onboarding process much more personal by sending an email informing the new hire of the orientation schedule, what to expect on the first day, etc. It’s also possible to integrate Docusign with Workday, making the inevitable paperwork that comes with starting a new job much easier.