The most important in a nutshell!
- Preboarding of new employees takes place in the phase between signing the contract and the first day of work.
- With professional preboarding, you reduce employee turnover and strengthen employee loyalty.
- Using a preboarding app provides several advantages, such as making important information available centrally.
What is preboarding?
Preboarding is a part of onboarding. The onboarding process of new employees can be divided into three phases – preboarding, onboarding and postboarding. Preboarding is the first phase in the onboarding process. This takes place in the period between signing the contract and the first day of work. In this phase, new employees can build a relationship with their new employer even before their first day on the job. This is where things like sending and filling out tax forms, insurance documents and many more usually take place.
Why is professional preboarding so important?
Depending on how long your new employee’s notice period is, a long time may pass between hiring and starting work. During this time, the risk increases that your candidate will change their mind and not show up on the first day of work. There are many reasons why new employees change their minds. Besides reasons, such as sudden illness, where you as a company are powerless, there are also triggers where you can counteract with professional preboarding.
One of the biggest triggers is uncertainty. By the time they start work, many candidates ask themselves a few questions, such as:
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- Have I chosen the right company to work for?
- Will I fit in well with the new team?
- Should I stay at my current job after all?
If your candidate can’t find good answers to these questions, uncertainty increases and so does the risk that he or she will drop out.
It is therefore best to ensure that your new employees build an emotional attachment to the company as soon as they have signed their contract. Don’t just send them official documents, invite them to team events or send a video message from the CEO. Turn various adjusting screws that will make your new employees feel like they are making the right decision.
With professional preboarding, you not only reduce the uncertainty of your candidates and the associated employee turnover, but also strengthen employee retention.
Advantages of preboarding
Make your new employees feel welcome before their first day on the job and encourage them in their decision.
Automation of administrative and training tasks eliminates the need for long training days
Your new employees can already familiarize themselves with their new job during preboarding
Invite your candidates to a team dinner or company event.
Digitize preboarding with digital tools
Digital preboarding tools, such as preboarding apps or employee apps, help you provide new hires with all important information in a centralized and bundled way. Likewise, your new employees can exchange with their colleagues even before their 1st day of work.
Preboarding apps offer a variety of features to help you best pick up your new employees before their first day on the job. Create small quizzes, your new employees learn so playfully everything important about the company and their fields of activity. You can provide important documents via a document storage in the preboarding app. Via a stored employee directory, your new employees can get an overview of colleagues and their function as well as get in touch with them via chat.
Introducing a preboarding app also makes it easy to transition to the other onboarding phases.
The Preboarding App with Polario
With Polario, you can map your preboarding as a standalone app, or you can implement your preboarding, onboarding, and employee communications using a single app. There are two approaches to this. Either you create 3 different projects in the content management system or you create one project which can be divided into preboarding, onboarding and employee communication via the menu items. Regardless of which approach you choose, content creation and maintenance takes place via a single CMS with Polario.
6 tips for successful preboarding of new employees
- Start preboarding promptly after the job commitment to crush uncertainty among new employees early on.
- If company or team events are held before the first day of work, invite your new employee.
- Consider a preboarding app
- Create a welcome folder with information such as a team introduction, training and development opportunities, benefits and the mission statement. You can send these to the new employees or store them in the preboarding app.
- Give your new employee information directly about the first days of work, so he or she can prepare.
- Clarify any unanswered questions before the first day of work. A kind of FAQ is suitable for this purpose, where the most frequent and most important questions are answered.
7 onboarding tips for a successful start in the company
Onboarding helps new employees get off to a good start at your company. Here are 7 tips for successful onboarding.
Checklist Pre- & Onboarding
Stay on top of things with our small checklist for the pre- & onboarding of new employees.
