The comic strip on the left is NOT how you want your onboarding process to go.

We were joined yesterday by recruiting thought leader Elaine Orler of Knowledge Infusion to discuss onboarding with a limited budget. With budget cuts becoming widespread in many companies, onboarding is unfortunately a process that often gets cut.

Elaine revealed that an effective onboarding process will reduce turnover in the first 30-90 days and increase productivity among new hires. In addition, effective onboarding can help your brand and reputation.

New hires form opinions of your organization starting on day one. Through bypassing redundant forms and busy work on the first day, new employees are more likely to form a positive opinion of their new role. By welcoming an employee into your business culture as soon as possible, you are in turn preparing them to succeed at their job.

Throughout the course of the webinar, Elaine covered onboarding strategies that included extending existing technology, improving collaboration and communication, and introducing new tools that can help onboarding efforts.

By using a “conversation ecosystem” with third party applications like Facebook, Twitter, and blogging, it’s possible to quickly engage a new hire into the social community of your business environment. Also, by implementing a mentoring or “buddy system” with existing employees, you can acclimate new employees to their roles. In addition many of these strategies cost little to nothing.

At the conclusion of the presentation (about 40 minutes into the video) Elaine answered a plethora of questions from the audience. Among the topics covered were how to onboard current employees into new positions, the challenges of onboarding across different countries and cultures, and different strategies for onboarding across generations. View the slideshow and archived video of the presentation below to learn more!