An effective onboarding process starts from the moment a work candidate accepts an offer from your business and may continue for several months in some instances. Thus, what is an effective onboarding process?

It's a planned process which helps a newly hired professional become acclimated with his position and your organization. It allows him to ease to his job slowly, making it comfortable to take care of the transition while learning new things, understanding the business, melding to the business culture, and also building connections with other workers throughout the business.

The onboarding process for new hires must start before their official launch date. Communication together until the day they start shows you're thinking of them. Prove that you're anticipating them by making sure even the simplest things are done--having a desk setup with files, an email account, relevant software programs with usernames and passwords, etc.. Don't wait till they appear and then scramble around trying to get them located. If you do, this will give a bad impression and they will wonder what they got themselves into.

Contrary to a worker orientation, an effective onboarding process should be a customized plan that meets the needs of their hire and not merely assists him outline early goals for his position, but helps him achieve them. It requires the enterprise to support him by giving him personal attention, being available for questions, and helping him during his first phase of employment with your organization.

It's important to call for management and other high-level company leaders in a successful onboarding process because it provides the worker the feeling of being appreciated if he has more of a connection with the business direction. This creates a first-class onboarding process from the employee's mind and is critical to your company if you want to secure him to your long haul and receive a return on your investment.

According to an article titled, Bringing Them Onboard from Lin Grensing-Pophal, and printed on HREOnline.com, Lilith Christiansen, vice president of Kaiser Associates Inc. in Washington, and co-author of Successful Onboarding, states, "From our client work as well as research on the topic, we definitely feel like onboarding is a great opportunity for an organization to create more value for the enterprise by investing up-front in the first year of a new hire's entry into the organization."