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4 Reasons Why You Should Automate Employee Onboarding in 2024

Employee onboarding is acquainting a new hire with the company’s working and operational culture. But the process isn’t always smooth: A study done by Gallup found that 88% of employees believe their organization does not onboard well. 

There are mainly 4 reasons behind companies onboarding poorly: 

  1. Inadequate interdepartmental cooperation, 
  2. Not briefing the new hire on company culture and policy, 
  3. Having a one-size-fits-all onboarding material for all new hires regardless of their new position,
  4. And not training the new hires with the business’ existing applications.

An automated onboarding process can remedy these four shortcomings because it will systematize the way that new hires are integrated into the company. In this article, we will go in-depth into how and why.

1. Automated employee onboarding makes it easy to learn about the company

New hires have to absorb large chunks of information, very quickly, during their orientation. Therefore, it’s normal if they happen to forget some details here and there.

For instance, they might not remember the amount of paid vacation days the company offers. Or might forget the first name of their department head.

It’s time-consuming, and antiquated, to refer back to knowledge sources such as an email or an employee pamphlet to get one’s answers. Besides, if the knowledge sources are not up-to-date, they might cause misunderstanding and spread false information.

Companies can leverage RPA-enabled conversational AI technology to create a chatbot that can act as an interactive knowledge source between the employee and the company. The benefit is that employees can ask their questions 24/7 and receive instant responses.

2. Automated employee onboarding streamlines interdepartmental cooperation 

A new hire needs to understand everything that pertains to them, such as the: 

  • Legal responsibilities they have, 
  • Financial obligations they face, 
  • Performance metrics they should meet, and more. 

Moreover, it is claimed that a new hire to complete over 50 activities during their onboarding process, such as signing documents, setting up their desk, learning the company culture, and acknowledging their contractual responsibilities.

The particulars each come from a separate department. This means a thorough onboarding requires simultaneous interdepartmental cooperation. For instance, if:

  • The company’s insurance doesn’t cover a specific health package, the HR department should make it clear. 
  • The company has a more strict NDA policy than the industry average, the legal department should make it clear.
  • The company measures performance success by specific metrics, the management should make that clear. 
  • Or if there are any specific company laws that a newcomer might be unfamiliar with, the management should make it clear.

Failure to explain each policy clearly throughout the onboarding process could result in legal, financial, and operational complications both for the employee and the employer. 

Onboarding software allows for the creation of workflows that will be set off by trigger schedulers. For instance, anytime a new employee is added to Quickbooks, through API and RPA, the software can:

  • Extract their information,
  • Schedule onboarding meetings,
  • And provide them with log-in credentials to company portals.

3. Automated employee onboarding personalizes the onboarding experience 

The onboarding process does not have to be bland and generic. The onboarding software can automatically gather the new hire’s information through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) from the ERP systems to curate a personalized onboarding experience. 

For instance, if there’s a PowerPoint presentation, the intelligent RPA bots powered by OCR can read the employee’s name, extract it, and insert it onto the slides to convey a sense of familiarity.

Moreover, the presentation that will be shown to the hire will be specific to the department they will work in. So a new accountant, for instance, will sit through a presentation that is curated for the accounting department. This means manual mistakes, thankfully, get minimized and that there is no waste of resources.

Or if any emails should be sent to get the new staff up and running, the content will be personalized (see Figure 1).

A screenshot of an email sent out by an employer to a new hire, during the employee onboarding process, telling them the steps they need to follow to get started.
An auto-generated email curated to a new developer hire that is instructing them and initiating a conversation. Source: YouTube

4. Automated employee onboarding familiarizes the employee with the business applications 

You cannot expect IT teams or department heads to dedicate more than a couple of hours to teach new hires how to use the existing business applications. Another important factor is that it is more efficient if the new hires are familiarized with the applications before they start.

An automated training system can be implemented wherein the usage of each application is recorded through screen recording and shared with the employees, on demand. In addition, the chatbot can also be used in this stage: It can be scripted to copy-paste the most relevant answers to the employee’s technical questions by recognizing certain keywords. 

Let’s imagine the new finance hire does not know where to find last month’s invoices. The user would ask the chatbot, “Where can I find last month’s invoices?” The software would recognize the words “find” and “invoices,” and would then copy and paste the relevant answer from the database. 

The benefit of automating the tutorials or the technical FAQs is that the new hire would receive their answer faster than they would have done if they asked one of the personnel. The other benefit would be that the other employees wouldn’t have to spend time dealing with such issues. Instead, they could be better spending their time elsewhere. 

For more on onboarding

To learn more about onboarding, read:

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Access Cem's 2 decades of B2B tech experience as a tech consultant, enterprise leader, startup entrepreneur & industry analyst. Leverage insights informing top Fortune 500 every month.
Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
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Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

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