Good first impressions lead to increased retention and productivity, which is obviously good for a company’s bottom line. Employees start building first impressions the minute they make contact with a company, so it is important to start the onboarding process as soon as an offer is accepted. You need to make absolutely sure that your new hire feels welcomed, valued and prepared to do his or her job. To ensure your company gives new hires the best first impression possible, you should:

• Be ready for the new hire – What kind of impression will employees have if when they show up on their first day nothing is ready? Email isn’t set up; their new workstation is a mess; or paperwork they need to sign isn’t ready to go; all of which will leave a bad taste in their mouths. Make sure everything is ready on day one when your new hire starts. It not only helps in forming a positive opinion about the company, but also helps them become productive members of the team faster.

• Automate the administrative end of the onboarding – What’s even better than having paperwork ready for employees to sign on the first day? Having no paperwork for them to sign. Automate the process and go paperless, this way new employees can fill out all paperwork before the first day and hit the ground running.

• Immerse your new hire in the company culture – Get new employees feeling excited to be a part of your team. Let them know about the company’s policies and rules, and introduce them to co-workers that can help them get a better understanding of what the company is about.

• Make new employees feel welcome and valued as key players on the team – Make sure your new employee is included on meetings and is giving material to familiarize themselves with your business. Make a plan for someone to eat lunch with on the first day so they start feeling they’re part of the team and walk them around the office.

• Give them time to get situated and familiar with their new jobs – Don’t just go throwing new employees into “do or die” situations. Ensure they are giving proper training and not left feeling overwhelmed or confused.

As the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a great first impression. Don’t miss your opportunity to engage your new hire and secure a loyal employee.

We would like to thank Jon Holden, Director at Silkroad this great guest blog.

The problem is this: unstructured interviews, where people trust their intuition to make hires, have almost the same ‘predictive validity’ (the chances of selecting someone for the job who performs well) as tossing a coin. Oh dear. So how did we all come to trust our intuition in the first place? I mean, given that most of us have endured strings of failed relationships after selecting completely inappropriate partners at various points in our lives, what makes us think we’re better at selecting people to be an accountant (or whatever)? Hasn’t experience taught us anything? Well, don’t worry too much, its human nature, and we don’t know any better. Studies have shown how people consistently over-estimate their own ability to make effective decisions. No-one likes admitting they’re a terrible judge of success in a given circumstance (least of all me).

But then I have had the benefit/curse of inhabiting the curious world of the assessment professional, which taught me very quickly the error of my ways. The chances are, if you ask an Occupational Psychologist ‘are you a great interviewer?’ you’ll get a mumbled response and a bunch of further questions. What kind of interview? What do you mean? Define what ‘great’ is? …etc. The thing is, a truly great interviewer is rather like an unemotional machine. An interview-dalek, if you will. Actually, if you could programme a dalek to ask behaviourally anchored questions and score people on a structured rating scale using objective evidence, they would be pretty close to what we understand the ‘perfect’ interviewer to be. Just remove the death-ray thing before putting it front of candidates.

“By combining the nine percent and the 16 percent, we get 25 percent, so we can conclude that a quarter of all training fails to deliver a significant performance improvement,” said Kevin Lovell, Learning Strategy Director at KnowledgePool. “Figures from the Learning and Skills Council show that UK organisations spend around £38bn on training annually, so that means they could be wasting £9.5bn of training investment each year.”

I have to say that I agree. How often is training used as a ‘perk’ or form of bonus for the employee – rather than a tactical response to a commercial requirement?