Employee onboarding automation: tips for advancing your HR career

Find out how to get started with employee onboarding automation, how to use it for your personal development, and why it’s critical for the competitiveness of your business.

Attracting and retaining talent is one of the most crucial factors that contributes to an organization’s success. Still, many business owners and decision-makers are either unaware of, or unwilling to rethink, their obsolete recruiting strategies — leaving their HR specialists no choice but to process loads and loads of employee data manually.

This traditional mentality is simply incompatible with the new talent of this generation. Today’s reality is that employers lose 17% of their new hires within their first three months due to ineffective employee onboarding procedures. At the same time, 69% of employees are likely to stay with a company for more than a year if they had a great onboarding experience.

By implementing automated onboarding processes, optimizing workflows, and cutting out waste, your HR team can spend more time focusing on what is really important: people. This makes automated employee onboarding an irreplaceable part of achieving employee satisfaction and reaching retention goals.

Luckily, you no longer need to pay thousands of dollars for complex onboarding automation software, hire software developers, or spend months training your existing staff. The universal answer to your automation needs is already within your reach.

Read this article to find out how airSlate’s no-code, easy-to-configure solution, can help you automate any part of your HR workflow chain while supplying you with a free education hub for learning the ins and outs of automation along the way.

Why traditional onboarding techniques cause bottlenecks

Employee onboarding starts as soon as a job offer is sent. It includes getting all documents signed, allocating the workplace, providing the needed equipment, introducing an employee to the team, and so on. This is what a typical paper-based onboarding workflow looks like:

Step 1.
A prospective employee receives a job offer from the HR department and prints it out. They then fill in their details and sign it. After that, they scan the job offer and send it back to the HR department.

Step 2.
The HR department receives the offer, checks the provided information, and prints it out.

Step 3.
The HR department notifies the IT department about the new employee via email.

Step 4.
The IT department managers prepare the required equipment, the workplace, and register the new user accounts.

Step 5.
The HR department prints the Equipment Use and Confidentiality agreements and asks the employee to sign them.

Step 6.
The new employee signs the documents and gives them back to the HR department.

Step 7.
The HR department scans all of the signed documents and forwards them to the Finance and Executive boards.

As you can see, employee onboarding performed using traditional methods is a time-consuming and challenging procedure. (Which it shouldn’t be!)

Now imagine the types of delays that can pop up if someone mishandles one of the steps mentioned above. Any number of issues can arise, in particular:

What do you get by applying onboarding automation to your HR processes?

Recent research shows that HR managers could save up to 14 hours a week using automation. Just imagine the impact routine manual processes have on your business’s productivity. According to another survey, managing people has been ranked as the second most common source of stress in the workplace. As a result, 44 percent of HR managers frequently feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities.

An automated onboarding process helps prevent last-minute confusion and compliance issues.

When properly set up, workflow automation provides HR teams with the tools to:

• Onboard new hires in minutes, including the ability to remote hire.
• Reduce paper-based tasks and manual copy-paste work.
• Minimize human intervention and errors.
• Maintain transparency in the hiring process.
• Go green (environmentally and financially) with less recycled paper.
• Make the onboarding experience for new hires exciting and straightforward.

You can not only improve onboarding process but also streamline other business operations. The most common use cases include things like filling out and managing internal job applications, leave requests, employee exit checklists, performance reviews, and so much more.

Here’s how airSlate can improve onboarding process

Since every workflow is different, the automation software you choose should correspond with your preferred HR processes. Many software providers mislead users by selling them onboarding automation tools that don’t possess the real power of automation.

When choosing an employee onboarding software, make sure it provides you with Bots. Bot automation is the process of automating repetitive tasks such as data entry. If adequately configured, Bots can complete any task for you without further action on your part.

airSlate allows businesses to focus on what they love to do — bringing teams, partners, and customers together. However, all of that would not be possible without continually improving skills and gaining new practical knowledge.

For this purpose, the airSlate Academy was established. It teaches students how to apply automation in their organization’s processes. Enroll to learn how to apply the right process automation strategy to your company’s workflows, calculate ROI, and deploy solutions inside your organization.

Set up your first automated onboarding process today

Here’s a simple example of how you can improve onboarding process using airSlate in just 4 simple steps:

1. An HR manager creates a new employee record and an onboarding package containing all the employee’s data. Next, this information is automatically sent to the employee’s email. The HR manager then configures the Reminder Bot to send email reminders to the employee to fill in their onboarding form.
   
2. The Notification Bot is set to notify the HR and reporting managers that the employee has signed and submitted their employee onboarding form.
   
3. The Export to Google Sheet Bot is activated to transfer the employee’s data to the database. This information is then used to complete other HR documents, order new equipment, assign IT assets, and set up new salary accounts.
   
4. Finally, the employer is notified via email about the new employee joining their team. The employee then receives a confirmation email for their successful onboarding along with their employee handbook.

In the same way, you can complete and automate any business process in your organization without paying extra for third-party solutions and API-integrations.

In fact, you can set up your own automated onboarding process right now — absolutely for free! To do so, use either a pre-built Employee Onboarding Flow Template or create a new one from scratch.

And if you still have questions or wish to upgrade your skills, apply for a free Employee Onboarding Course and get certified in onboarding automation fundamentals in just 3 hours! Here you will get detailed step-by-step instructions on how to set up the automated onboarding process in your organization in the most efficient way possible.

The bottom line

Despite what many might think, successful employee onboarding is not solely about introductions. First, it sets the tone for the employee’s relationship with their new company. If the process is disconnected and poorly organized, the employee’s chances of success are diminished while the likelihood of turnover increases.

With the automated onboarding process powered by airSlate, your HR department can minimize heavy workloads and reduce stress by eliminating labor-intensive tasks such as data collection and processing, all while securely storing new-hire information in one place. At the same time, new hires experience a positive first impression while undergoing smooth onboarding.

Save your time and resources and use them to achieve higher-priority goals. Sign up for a free airSlate account now or advance your professional skills with free airSlate certification programs covering various topics and industries.