Onboarding Life Sciences Talent
A strong onboarding process is essential for setting new hires up for success and encouraging long-term retention. In fact, great onboarding can make employees 69% more likely to stay with a company for at least three years. The first experiences a new employee has should not only solidify their decision to join and reduce any lingering doubts but also strengthen their connection to your team and culture from day one. With that, let’s get onboarding.
Download the full ebook:
50 Tips for Building Life Sciences Teams
Field-tested insights and best practices for navigating the talent journey, from attraction to retention
Make sure you're ready to onboard
When organizations that aren’t accustomed to high-volume hiring suddenly need to scale up, it can easily catch them off guard. Being prepared is crucial—failing to plan is planning to fail. This is especially true when you’re bringing on larger groups, such as 10 or more new hires, which is a completely different challenge than filling one or two roles. That brings us to…
Prime your systems
Make sure your ATS system and your tech stack (think Zoom, Slack, emails, etc.) are all fully ready to bring on your new hires. Hiccups during the process not only hurt productivity, they can also leave a sour taste in the mouth of new hires who may quickly feel like you weren’t truly prepared for their onboarding.
Pre-onboard with excellence
The time between offer acceptance and start date is arguably more important than the first 90 days, especially when it comes to contingent offers. It is crucial to keep candidates engaged during this period to both begin the onboarding process and ensure they aren’t easily swayed by another offer.
Develop a training plan
Recognize and thoughtfully prepare for the fact that every new hire is going to need some degree of training—no matter if you’re hiring entry-level contributors or industry veterans. Who’s going to handle this training? How extensive will it be? How will success be measured? Use these questions as a starting point to develop a practical plan that will help streamline the onboarding training process.
Require in-person interaction
Regardless of your workplace arrangements, each new hire’s onboarding should have a live component to it within the first 4-6 weeks. There’s simply too much value in surrounding new hires with people, in person, to help build understanding, personal connection, and cooperation. All of the technology in the world can’t substitute for real-world human interaction. At the same time…
Great onboarding can make employees
69% more likely to stay
with a company for at least three years.
Engage new hires virtually
Even with return-to-office (RTO) gaining traction, most roles in today’s world are still remote or hybrid, and that’s likely to continue. So, while you should insist on some in-person interaction, it’s also important to leverage technology to help new hires feel part of the team as quickly as possible. Celebrate their arrival on Slack, set up virtual video calls with others in the organization, whatever it may be—find ways to welcome them to your team’s digital ecosystem.
Don't just onboard new hires—on-brand them
You want new hires to look and feel like part of your team as soon as possible. This not only helps them integrate into your company but also generates external interest from their network. In addition to swag, provide digital assets like LinkedIn banners, company descriptions, and professional headshots they can use to update their social profiles. Even custom video backgrounds can add a nice touch for conference calls!
Avoid overengineering the process
There are a few critical things that need to be done right away in the onboarding process—namely, HR, payroll, and IT setup. But otherwise, don’t feel like you need to have every moment of every day planned out for new hires. In our experience, keeping things flexible and giving people time to acclimate organically is much appreciated.
Set up new leaders with transition coaches
Even if you employ disciplined selection processes, the assimilation process for new leaders can still be a challenge. According to research, nearly 3 out of 4 leaders believe they are underprepared for new roles and many fail to deliver on expectations. One of the best ways to avoid this? Transition coaching, which has been shown to double the likelihood of success in a new role.
Conduct 30-60-90-day reviews
Having a well-connected leader or HR team member conduct structured check-ins at 30, 60, and 90 days to review the new hire’s progress and help fill in any gaps they might have can be a wonderful addition to the onboarding process. Non-supervisor support makes it easier for new hires to ask “silly questions,” connect the dots, and gain insights from different parts of the business.
