Effectively onboarding new employees so they are equipped and prepared to be productive on day one has never been more challenging than it is today. As a hiring manager, you may be dealing with higher-than-normal employee turnover as a result of The Great Resignation, along with labor shortages that make it difficult to find excellent people.
On top of that, your department’s technology stack is probably more complex than ever, while your team may be geographically dispersed: some in the office, some working remotely, and some using a hybrid work model.
The truth of the matter is that the pressure on your team to produce isn’t getting any lighter. Challenges or not, you need help from both your HR and IT departments to get your new hires properly provisioned and ready to start as quickly as possible.
If everyone is doing their best but there are still gaps and shortcomings in your company’s onboarding and it provisioning process, the answer isn’t to work harder but to do things differently. Choosing the right technology is the first step in automating and optimizing the employee provisioning process.
Hiring Manager Concerns with the Onboarding and Provisioning Process
In our conversations with hiring managers across departments, organizations and industries, the most critical concern we hear time and time again is new hire speed to productivity. This is especially true for highly compensated knowledge workers, where the organization expects to start getting a payback on their investment quickly.
To achieve a more efficient new hire speed to productivity rate, hiring managers need help from HR to get new employees versed with company policies and culture as they are integrated into the organization. In addition, hiring managers need IT’s help to make sure new hires are equipped from day one with the right hardware and access to the right systems. With these in place, new employees can more confidently jump into their work.
But all too often, new hires don’t have what they need – when they need it – to be productive beginning the first day of employment. Instead, they are constrained and frustrated if they show up and don’t have login credentials to key systems or even a properly working building access or identification badge. As a result, new hire productivity is limited by complex onboarding processes that require centralization, coordination, and visibility.
There are onboarding and provisioning processes in place to help get the new hire productive, but things fall through the cracks regardless. Why? Because no one individual in the organization owns the problem.
HR focuses on the necessary pre-start paperwork, compliance, and communicating policies yet has no control over technology provisioning. IT focuses on provisioning the new employee with hardware and access enablement but can only work with the timelines and information they are given. As the hiring manager, you may be officially tasked with overall responsibility for getting your new hire settled in and productive, but you have no control over the HR or IT tasks.
Compounding those issues, the onboarding and provisioning process is often a black hole. There is little to no visibility into what’s been done, what hasn’t been done, who was responsible, and the progress and status of incomplete tasks.
As a single individual hiring manager, you likely can't affect the changes required for a CIO to purchase a provisioning management platform, have dedicated resources to determine how to use it, and then deploy the new platform. But you and every other hiring manager in your organization benefit when this process runs smoothly and efficiently.
All things considered, perhaps it’s time for hiring managers to unite. It’s time to collectively come together and demand a better experience from their leadership, with better tools to solve these complex problems…or to at least get the conversation started.
The Hiring Manager Onboarding To-Do List
Like your head of HR and your CIO, you’ve got your own task list as part of the overall onboarding and provisioning process. As addressed in our previous post, How to Alleviate the Pain of Employee Onboarding and Provisioning for HR Leaders, the terms “onboarding” and “provisioning” are sometimes confused or used interchangeably, but they are two unique and distinct processes.
Onboarding is primarily an HR function. It encompasses everything from getting background checks and payroll forms completed to arranging team-building exercises.
Provisioning is just one part of the overall onboarding process. It includes equipping employees with the products and system access they need to do their jobs. The IT department is generally in charge of employee provisioning, though they will rely on your guidance as the hiring manager.
Your specific to-do list for new hires is likely include such things as:
- introducing new hires to their coworkers
- scheduling a team lunch
- setting up one-on-one meetings
- discussing their job duties, objectives, and the software they’ll be using
- helping them understand how their role fits into overall company operations
In many organizations, the hiring manager and HR leader are jointly responsible for the overall employee experience: making them feel welcomed and excited to be part of your team. Tasks like giving the employee a welcome kit full of branded swag and showing them around the office (if they will actually be working on site) may fall to you or to HR.
How the Right Technology Can Really Improve the Process
For success, hiring managers need a centralized portal to easily request everything necessary to get new employees up and running. However, the centralized portal is not merely a request interface; it should also integrate with back-end systems across the company so that as many tasks as possible can be automated, removing the need to manually orchestrate each of the pieces of the process.
Such a portal would help solve the two biggest issues hiring managers face in bringing new people on board:
- It would help ensure new hires have all of the equipment and systems access they need to accelerate speed to productivity.
- It would provide visibility into the status of every request — whether it’s completed, and if not, where things are at.
As noted in our post for HR leaders, The Kinetic Platform is an orchestration engine that manages provisioning tasks to help make new employees productive more quickly. It does this by centralizing the needed inputs from hiring managers, coordinating tasks across departments, and providing visibility throughout the process.
It doesn’t replace the systems your company has already invested in but rather enhances their value. The Kinetic Platform simplifies your role as a hiring manager, as well as your communication with HR and IT. It does this by providing one centralized place to submit all of your provisioning-related requests.
Wrapping Up
This is the third post in our series looking at how to improve the new employee onboarding and provisioning process, from the perspective of HR, of IT, and now of you, the hiring manager.
But what about the perspective of the new employee? New hires aren’t part of the technology acquisition process. But the good news is, their objectives are very much in line with the team managing the onboarding process.
They want it to be a well-organized, positive experience. They want to be properly provisioned so they can get started on doing their jobs quickly. Finally, they want to believe they’ve made a great choice in joining your organization, they are engaged, and they rapidly come to feel like a productive member of your team.
If you’re a hiring manager and want to learn how provisioning can make your job easier and more streamlined, contact the experts at Kinetic Data! We’d love to chat with you about how our platform solves employee provisioning for your organization.
Cassy Lueneburg