How to onboard employees effectively with Homebase

A great onboarding experience is the first step to successfully retaining your team members. The top talent you hired will remember the first impression they got the first day on the job—and if you know how to onboard employees the right way, that impression is much more likely to be positive.Onboarding is the process of familiarizing your new employee with your business and your staff. The journey starts as soon as the new employee accepts your job offer. Your new hire checklist should include collecting all of the new employee forms, introducing the employee to your company culture, and making sure they’re aware of the policies on your dress code, benefits package, and more.

{{banner-cta}}

 Executing an effective onboarding program (and pre-boarding process) requires the right tools and technology to help the process along, especially if you don’t have a human resources department. Homebase is here to help with onboarding best practices from start to finish. In this article we’ll cover how the great features we offer can make onboarding a breeze, resulting in effective employees and a happy workplace. 

Hire top talent 

In order to onboard new hires, you have to actually hire them first. With the plethora of free job posting sites online today, it can be time consuming to make sure you’ve covered all of the bases. Homebase’s free employee hiring tool makes posting jobs and finding the best candidates easy and quick. With Homebase Hiring, you can create a job post in less than a minute. We even have pre-written, customizable job descriptions from which you can choose. Then you can post it to the top job boards—including Indeed, Zip Recruiter, Glassdoor, and more—for free.

Once you receive responses you can manage all of the candidates, no matter what site they’re coming from, in one place. You can also message them straight from the Homebase app to schedule interviews. After a successful interview is conducted and a job offer is made, you can import the winning candidate straight into your Homebase team and schedule his or her first shift. 

Prepare for your employee’s first day 

As mentioned earlier, part of your onboarding checklist includes getting your new hire’s paperwork in order before he or she starts working. This includes not only contact information and employment contracts, but also federal and state forms that are required by law to be completed by each employee. Homebase can help onboard employees in this area as well. In fact, we’ve made it easy for your new hires to self-onboard before the job starts so you have more time on the first day to introduce your staff to their new teammate. 

When using Homebase, your new hire will receive a packet that includes every required U.S. federal and state new hire form. Before starting work, the employee will be able to enter their information and provide the necessary e-signatures. The most important aspect of your new hire checklist is to make sure you’re correctly storing these onboarding documents. If not, you could face serious fines and penalties. Luckily, all of the signed documents can be correctly stored and accessible in Homebase, so you won’t have to worry about making an error. Ready to get started? Click here to sign up free for Homebase!

Introduce your new hire to your team 

It’s important that your new employee quickly feels comfortable around coworkers. Your existing workers will play a crucial role in displaying company culture and policies, and the more your new hire feels welcome and a part of your team, the higher chance you have of increasing employee retention. 

Still, you can’t expect your new hire to be comfortable enough to ask for everyone’s phone number. The Homebase free messaging app is a great solution to expediting team communication.  With the app, you can encourage your existing employees to reach out to your new employee to share tips, advice, and simply get to know their new teammate in an easy, streamlined way. They can also send shout outs through the messaging app to encourage the new hire that they’re doing a great job so far. 

Gather feedback from your new employee

The last step in your “how to onboard employees” checklist should be to gather feedback. This way you can learn more about how you can improve your onboarding best practices. 

You can do this easily through Homebase’s shift feedback feature. When the employee clocks out with the Homebase time clock, he or she will be prompted to select the number of stars they’d rate the specific shift. Your employee can then add a note about the shift experience. It’s in this space that your new employee can say what he or she liked about the onboarding process. With this feedback you can make a note of what to keep doing, what to improve and how to establish a simplified onboarding process. Onboard employees the right way by making Homebase part of your new hire checklist. Click here to sign up for free today!