You might be asking: just how important is onboarding in HigherEd, and how much of a difference can digitized onboarding really make?
The answer? It makes a HUGE difference. Digitized onboarding not only allows new hires to learn more and get up to speed faster, but saves so much paperwork time for human resources teams—time that can be spent working with new hires and current employees directly, or focused on strategy.
Hear below from some PeopleAdmin customers who used Employee Records, PeopleAdmin’s onboarding and record management solution, to take their processes to the next level.
Hours, not days
At Prairie State College, leveraging Employee Records saves Kirsten Mahone, Recruiting and Training Specialist, huge amounts of time with every hire she handles. “It’s so easy,” Kirsten noted. “We hired someone today! When I’m in ATS, it’s so easy to go click on ‘recommend for hire’ and then pull in all the candidate’s information so they can complete all their new hire paperwork online, and then I can download it if I need to. The way we used to do it, candidates had to come into the office. Getting someone’s paperwork set up used to take up half my day. Once someone was recommended for hire, I would have to call them up and find out when they could come in to complete their paperwork—which had to happen before orientation. Our hours are 8 AM to 4:30 PM, so people often couldn’t come in if they were still working at another job. If I had five different candidates all participating in one orientation, getting them all in to do their paperwork beforehand was crazy. Now, that process takes me no more than two hours.”
Less time in the HR office
At Messiah University, Don Lerew, Assistant Director of Human Resources, was excited about how much digitized onboarding impacted the first day of work for new hires. “It’s so nice that a new hire can go online and do almost everything in advance of their first work day, rather than coming to HR and signing packets at the desk,” said Don. “When new hires are signing things on the spot in an office, it’s hard to know if they’re even able to read it thoroughly—plus, it’s taking up the time of an HR person who has to sit there while the new hire reviews the paperwork. When users can do it online in advance, they can actually read through and agree to the policy without feeling rushed.”
No more chasing paper
As the HR Information and Data Specialist and the University of New England, Jessica Austin-Luce used to spend a lot of time on new hire paperwork. New employees were supposed to print their paperwork before coming in on their first day, but often, something was forgotten—so her team kept packets at the front desk. Jessica spent time running from business office to HR office to drop off physical documents, until in 2020, the pandemic made these processes impossible.
“For a while, there was one person in the office, one day a week,” said Jessica. “Almost no one has a printer anymore, and no one had a scanner, so there was no way for candidates to get documents to us… People who come in through the new system see digitized onboarding as the standard today. Hiring on paper just doesn’t happen any more.”
Saving time and creating personalization
At Mount San Antonio College, onboarding processes used to involve a huge packet of paperwork. When the college started hiring and onboarding employees remotely, this became a problem: new hires needed to print forms, fill them out, and then upload them into DropBox for review. Mount SAC’s HR team was often left waiting for important documents during the slow process.
“Turning paper processes into electronic ones frees up our recruiters from manual collections and entry,” said Vanessa Ortiz, Human Resources Analyst, “and it’s user-friendly for the new hires… The team needs some information right away, such as an employee’s I-9. It’s great that they can fill out time-sensitive documents and we have access to it right away, without waiting for the entire new hire packet to be complete before returning it to HR.”
Ready to leave paperwork in the past?
Reach out to our experts to learn more about digitized onboarding with Employee Records.