How to Maximize Your New Hire’s Potential

I came across a whitepaper from CareerBuilder the other day, which stated that U.S. and U.K. employees cost businesses an estimated $37 billion every year because they do not fully understand their jobs, according to IDC. Their recently released white paper, “$37 billion: Counting the Cost of Employee Misunderstanding,” commissioned by international intelligent assessment company Cognisco, quantifies the losses that occur as a result of “actions taken by employees who have misunderstood or misinterpreted — or were misinformed about or lack confidence in their understanding — of company policies, business processes, job function, or a combination of the three.”

Effective onboarding helps workers understand their roles and the company they work for, thereby significantly cutting these losses.

This reinforces a study by our sister program for HR Recruiting execs, CEB’s Recruiting Roundtable, a quantitative analysis to uncover the biggest drivers of new hire performance and engagement. Out of all the variables they tested, it came down to three key drivers:

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I want to focus on the first of the three – balancing scalable and personalized content.  While some things are non-negotiable for all new hires (training reps on company policies, business processes, job function, etc), the rest is not necessarily required.

We’ve seen sales academies or universities (which typically pick up after onboarding) evolve over recent years to switch away from a “supply and demand” view of training (supply the training and demand all sales reps attend) to a “demand and supply” approach (supply training only when demand has reached a critical mass).   They do this by using assessments to identify skill gaps, and only recommend trainings to reps that help them close an identified gap in a core competency.

Why not do the same for new hire onboarding?  In fact, the state of recruiting is such that many companies employ sophisticated assessment tools of candidates’ skills and competencies prior to hiring them.  Why not use that data to fast track the onboarding process?  Train them on the non-negotiables, and then customize the rest of their onboarding based on your assessment of their skill gaps.  Get your employees out of the classroom and up to speed more quickly.  And save your organization money and resources along the way!

SEC Members, see how BEA Systems used assessments to customize their onboarding plan to each new hire. Also, visit our Onboarding Topic Center for more resources and onboarding ideas.