Disorganized hiring and onboarding can lead to unnecessary stress and delays for new hires, managers and HR staff alike. Whether it’s navigating multiple email threads, locating resume attachments, reentering employee data, or compressing multiple HR tasks into the new hire’s first day, a manual onboarding process often leads to long-term issues with productivity, employee satisfaction, and employee retention.
Fortunately, a well-designed candidate portal supports multiple phases of the employee lifecycle: recruitment, hiring, preboarding, electronic onboarding, and early productivity in the first year of a new hire’s tenure with your organization. Practically speaking, it minimizes administrative tasks, eliminates paperwork, provides convenient self-service options for new hires, and ensures a productive and positive start for each new member of your workforce.
In this article, we’ll explore how a candidate portal provides a convenient, expedited hiring and onboarding experience for new employees while making communication, training, and performance management more efficient for your managers and HR personnel.
Recruitment Stage
A proper and well-designed candidate portal demonstrates your organization’s professionalism and investment in keeping the hiring process streamlined, intuitive, and convenient for applicants and potential new hires. Particularly for new hires who must enter personal, employment, or financial information during the application or hiring process, a candidate portal eliminates the need to reenter the same information in later stages. Instead, this information is immediately incorporated into your organization’s HR system and fast-tracked to the onboarding phase in the event that an applicant is hired. Additionally, any communication regarding the posted position occurs exclusively through the HR system, bypassing the need for multiple email threads, follow-up calls, or delayed updates about the review process or hiring decisions.
Similarly, a candidate portal – especially when paired with an applicant tracking system (ATS) – makes resume review and identifying promising candidates significantly easier, helping you prioritize and filter key educational or work history requirements, or other factors that are integral to a given position. Since candidates can easily upload their cover letter, resume, references and other supporting documents through the portal, all key materials are stored in a single digital location and accessible to multiple staff members based on permissions. This expedites review time for hiring managers and shortens notification timelines for candidates, but also allows you to tailor applicant screening for particular positions. If, for instance, you’d like candidates for a particular position to complete an online skills test, provide a writing sample/portfolio, or participate in another kind of context-specific evaluation, a qualified candidate portal facilitates all of this.
A Bridge Between Recruitment and Onboarding
If you locate a promising candidate and extend an offer of employment, your candidate portal can then smoothly transfer all submitted applicant info into the HR portal, eliminating redundant tasks for the candidate, your HR staff, and managers.
As preboarding (onboarding before a new hire’s official Day One) continues to gain traction among competitive companies, it’s important to choose a candidate portal that allows your organization to immediately notify your new hire about required next steps once they accept an offer of employment. This includes providing them with access to practical HR resources, virtual meeting opportunities with staff, introductory videos, and any employment forms required for work eligibility and identity verification. A candidate portal allows you to promptly and efficiently deliver or provide access to all of these resources, including any required training modules or e-signatures that must be completed prior to the new hire’s first day.
Using a candidate portal also enhances a new hire’s acclimation to your company culture and helps new employees more incrementally complete onboarding steps. This is especially possible when you choose a cloud-based, mobile candidate portal that includes 24-7 self-service access. With a more extended timeline to complete onboarding tasks, new hires can complete steps gradually while hiring managers or other relevant personnel are notified when key steps are completed by the new hire. New hires can also enjoy the opportunity to get acquainted with other staff, including managers and mentors, well before they begin their official work either in-office or remotely. With greater transparency about the preboarding process, employees are likely to feel more prepared for their first day and more comfortable as they begin collaborating with their new teammates.
Our related article offers additional tips and best practices for maximizing the benefits of electronic onboarding.
Onboarding Benefits for Candidates, Employees, and Managers
As your new hires get closer to their official Day One start, a candidate portal can help you deliver information and resources like an office sitemap, information about the local area (parking, lunch options, etc), and unique credentials for company social channels like Slack. With the help of a candidate portal, your new hire (and any managers or mentors supporting them) will be able to start on the same page regarding scheduling, start times, safety protocols, and more.
A proper candidate portal also allows you to develop, deliver, and monitor a new employee’s progress and performance over time. Whether it’s setting up an initial meeting to discuss career goals, or establishing a 30-60-90-day plan to help a new employee meet agreed-upon goals in their first three months with the organization, a candidate portal makes scheduling, completing, and progress tracking streamlined and intuitive. Often, it’s best for the performance review process to extend through the first year of a new employee’s time with your organization. If significant progress is made or new opportunities arise, a candidate portal also makes it easy to share career advancement resources, speaker announcements, optional training opportunities and more through the portal, encouraging career development.
Lastly, although preboarding and electronic onboarding can make the first day much easier for new employees, it’s important (especially with remote employees) to sustain contact, demonstrate availability/access, and provide any necessary resources to support the ongoing onboarding process. Fortunately, a candidate portal makes this possible while also empowering employees to complete, manage, and review key HR processes at their own convenience using the self-service system on their laptop, smartphone, or another preferred device.
Optimize Hiring and Onboarding with Cello HR
Attracting top talent for your organization begins with implementing HR processes that are user-friendly, intuitive, and streamlined to enhance candidate experience. Once you’ve extended an offer of employment, it’s just as important to provide an electronic onboarding experience that helps new hires seamlessly transition to their new role, feeling informed, confident and supported along the way.
That’s why Cello HR offers comprehensive candidate portal solutions that can help you improve and streamline your talent acquisition and onboarding processes to boost productivity, employee satisfaction, and employee retention among new hires.
Ready to part ways with manual and redundant HR tasks? Take the first step towards enjoying hiring and onboarding peace of mind with Cello HR.