Dive Brief:
- A good onboarding program is key to increasing talent retention – but many employers forget to include a way to integrate new employees into the company culture, writes George Bradt for Forbes.
- He outlines three important ideas that hiring managers need to keep in mind when helping employees through onboarding: corporate culture is a “truly sustainable competitive advantage;” poor cultural fit is the “number one cause of new hire failure;” and executive onboarding is key to “reducing risk” in a new job.
- The companies most often plagued by this issue are those that are just starting to scale up, Bradt writes – those that are becoming too big for the founders to know everyone but not yet big enough to have a solid process in place.
Dive Insight:
JAMF Software CEO Dean Hager called this growth period an organization’s “teenage years,” Bradt said, where many companies end up “losing their souls.”
Bradt said that JAMF is an excellent example of a company maintaining their culture even as they experience strong growth. JAMF uses three one-week modules – Culture, Role, and Product – during their onboarding process to help new employees learn about the company and their new role. Everyone must participate, from the CEO on down.
A company must be willing to take a short-term financial hit, but the impact of such onboarding programs is statistically significant: employee retention rates are over 90% at JAMF.
