Does your organization have a process for new employee onboarding? How do you make sure you collect every form, provide all credentials, and assign the right training material?
The steps you take to get a new hire set up with their role, responsibilities, and credentials are your onboarding process, and it’s not as easy as it might first sound.
Training a new hire from a starter to a proficient team member is a long road, with tons of tiny things to remember. No matter how hard you try, holding all of these tasks in your head isn’t viable at scale.
A structured and documented onboarding program makes employees 69% more likely to stay with the company for three years, which reduces the cost of hiring and training.
A good onboarding experience also helps new employees fit in and get oriented with their surroundings, so it would follow that workers feel that onboarding is essential. One-fifth of workers surveyed by Christine Marino reported that the lack of a good onboarding process aided their decision to quit.
The most effective onboarding method — the method used by 63% of best-in-class companies — is a new hire checklist.
Checklists are just about the simplest tools a business can use but they are excellent at preventing the kinds of errors and oversight that make the onboarding phase difficult and increase your risk of employee turnover. Think about it — just by implementing a checklist, you could:
- increase employee retention by 25%
- Improve employee performance by 11%
- Increase revenue-by-full-time-employee by 19%
Let’s first look at what you should include in your onboarding checklist, and then move on to how to build an integration between that checklist and TalentLMS with onboarding process examples.
The elements of a great employee onboarding process
If you think about all of your job-relevant knowledge (passwords, procedures, standards) you have, you can imagine how transferring that to a new hire would be a long process. For most, it takes between one and three months, and includes the following tasks:
- Collect, track, and manage forms (insurance, benefits, emergency contacts)
- Provide instructions for first tasks and projects
- Grant access to software accounts, computer, company email, etc.
- Assign and track training
- Provide information about organizational structure (who do they report to, who do they need to know)
- Socialize with team, mentors, and organization
- Evaluate the onboarding process so it can be continuously improved
Since the onboarding phase is when training should be assigned, TalentLMS’ platform goes hand in hand with a new hire checklist. In the section below, we’ll look at how to automate TalentLMS user creation by tying it into your employee onboarding process.
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How to streamline your employee onboarding process with TalentLMS
Integrations help you avoid unnecessary data entry, and human error, all while keeping important information centralized.
In this onboarding process example, the employee onboarding process starts in Process Street, a tool that lets you create any business process, and integrate the steps with other tools. Popular processes include client and employee onboarding, sales qualification, and content approval.
We’ll start by adding the employee onboarding checklist to your Process Street account. You can find the process here.
Inside tasks, you’ll see form fields for the employee’s first and last name, username, email address and more. This data could have been inputted from your HR suite, or just manually typed out in the checklist.
When a later task — “Assign training material” — is checked off, Zapier grabs the employee’s information and uses it to create a new user in TalentLMS.
So the data goes from here…
…To here. Automatically.
Let’s get this set up!
Step 1: run a new employee onboarding checklist in Process Street
Log into your Process Street account, and find the employee onboarding checklist you just grabbed from the embed above.
Click “Run checklist” once inside.
Name your checklist with either a real employee you’re onboarding or a dummy name for test purposes. Zapier needs a bit of existing information to test the integration is working.
Fill out the required fields in task 3 and 7, then check off “Assign training material”, task 14.
Step 2: copy your Process Street API key
Now, before we get to Zapier you’re going to need an API key. Go to your organization settings in Process Street by logging in and clicking here, or just by clicking your organization’s name inside the app. Go to the “Settings & API” tab and get a new API key:
Step 3: Create the Zapier trigger
We want our trigger to fire every time we check off “Send training material” in your employee onboarding checklist. Log into Zapier, and create a new zap. Select Process Street as the trigger, and choose “New Task Checked”.
Click “Connect Account” on the next screen, and paste your Process Street API key that you copied earlier.
Next, you’ll see options for the template and checklist. Choose the same options we’ve selected below:
You should breeze through the test stage since you already populated a checklist with data before you started.
Step 4: get your TalentLMS API key
To connect TalentLMS to Zapier, you need an API key. Go to “Account & Settings” while in administrator mode, and tick “Enable API”. Copy the key to your clipboard.
Step 5: Create the Zapier action
Choose TalentLMS for the second, “action” part of the zap. Select “New User” as the action:
Continue, connecting your TalentLMS account to Zapier with the API key in your clipboard.
This next bit is where the magic happens. Use Zapier’s “add field” button, highlighted below, to fill in the user creation data with Process Street form fields.
The last thing you need to do is to send the test data from Zapier to TalentLMS. Continue through the zap setup, and then check TalentLMS when prompted to see your newly-created user!
Enable this zap and this process will happen automatically for all your onboarding users!
Improve your processes gradually
It’s often unworkable to make massive changes to your processes.
But, as you can see from this guide, making incremental changes like automating the assignment of training material doesn’t take a lot of time or effort but it does remove a point of failure from your systems.
Whether you’re fine-tuning your onboarding process or just starting to develop one, we hope this guide with an onboarding process example will help you toward your goal!
Author bio: Benjamin Brandall is a content marketer at Process Street, where he writes on startups, SaaS, and workflows to help you improve your business efficiency.
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