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What are on-boarding interviews?
Interviews that are conducted with new staff who have successfully completed their probation period. These usually occur 3-6 months after a new hire joins your organisation. They replace the cursory “how are you going” conversation that many managers have with new employees in doorways and coffee rooms with powerful feedback on how to keep and engage that person.
Most employees begin their relationship with a new employer with enthusiasm and excitement. These interviews help understand whether your selection and on-boarding processes added to or cooled that enthusiasm. This helps your recruitment team hone their processes. It also helps HR and line managers fine tune the entry path for new employees to nurture that initial enthusiasm and craft it into engagement and productivity.
On-boarding interviews differ to exit interviews in that an immediate opportunity exists to address the needs of an individual currently employed. Because of this it’s important that individual results are disclosed to at least someone within the organisation. Without this, much of the value of on-boarding interviews is lost.
Losing a new employee within the first 6 months is a very expensive loss. It means that your organisation receives almost no return on the costs of recruiting and on-boarding a new employee which can cost between 80% and 300% of the new hire’s annual salary.
On-boarding interviews are a valuable way to identify and address issues before it’s too late. It can also help identify what can be done systemically to make you’re on-boarding processes support rather than derail your retention efforts.
Note: Some organisations call these ‘stay interviews’ as they are aimed at ensuring new staff stay with the organisation. However for clarity we differentiate on-boarding interviews at the beginning of employment from stay interviews that can be conducted at any time of employment.
Why outsource? Shouldn’t managers or HR do this?
Managers have a critical impact on an employee's experience and this is even more pronounced for new hires who often need more attention initially. We know from exit data that the direct manager is a causal factor in resignation in around 20% of exits and an indirect cause in many more. Having the manager conduct the on-boarding interview can be counter-productive if the manager’s influence has not been entirely positive.
The HR team is usually the group that has created the recruitment and on-boarding processes. While some people are willing to be open with direct negative feedback to HR about HR, there is always a portion of people who will feel that this is too confronting.
In addition, skilled HR people are often time poor and feel more productive and motivated using their time to debrief and act on this kind of information rather than spending hours collecting it.
Using an external interviewer ensures a feeling of safety for employees, objectivity, consistency and brings a commitment to making sure they get done.
How would we use onboarding information?
There are two main uses for on-boarding data:
- Individual data can be used to identify immediate flight risks among new staff. This creates the opportunity to act now to prevent the loss of an individual, producing an immediate and tangible result that benefits the business. (Ask a line manager whether HR preventing the loss of a new staff member would have added value to the business and you’ll get a resounding “YES”.)
- Ideally HR reviews the report and then either they or the employee’s line manager (depending on the content of the report) debriefs it with the new staff member. This meeting identifies what needs to change to engage and retain that person. The net result should be a low staff turnover rate within the first 12 months of employment.
Trend data, as with exit interviews, identifies what systems, processes or behaviours need to change at a team, department or organisational level to achieve low staff turnover within the first 12 months of employment.
What does it cover?
- Recruitment and selection processes
- Employer brand and reputation
- Formal and on-the-job induction processes
- Satisfaction with known drivers of turnover
- Feedback on important aspects of their experience so far
- Identification of potential flight risk factors (careful wording required)
- Some basic manager feedback
- Feedback on the organisation as a whole so far
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