How to Strengthen the Relationship Between Recruiting and Onboarding

Last Updated: December 16, 2021

Recruiting does not end at the hire; tying it closely to the onboarding process is crucial to the employee experience as it saves money, time and paperwork, and increases retention writes Mitesh Ashar, SVP of product management at Bullhorn. 

The recruiting process does not end at the hire; onboarding is crucial to making it complete. Your new hires see the entire operation as a single set of events, and so should your organization. Tying recruiting and onboarding closer together saves resources and increases retention.

This is true whether you are a company hiring directly or a staffing agency placing temporary and contract workers. While the recruiting and onboarding functions are often held by different people in an organization, there are ways to meld them more closely, through technology and processes, to help staffing firms and hiring professionals improve their effectiveness.

Traditional Recruiting and the Handoff

Onboarding is often practiced as a separate function from the recruiting and hiring process, due to the different tasks involved. This may be less true in the temporary staffing world but is still an important reminder when handling the hiring lifecycle from start to finish.

The best way to think of this is to consider the candidate experienceOpens a new window ; whether with a direct employer or staffing agency, a jobseeker’s adventure is, from their point of view, singular, not a segmented group of barely-linked episodes. Recruiting professionals of all types should keep that in mind when designing the experience. Questions an organization should ask include:

  • Is our new hire experience consistently high-quality? If not, is the transition from hiring to onboarding a weak point in the process?
  • How can we get the people involved in the recruiting and onboarding processes to work more closely together than they already do?
  • What technology can we use to make sure that the candidate experience is seamless, from communications to onboarding documents such as employment contracts and payroll forms?

Why integrate onboarding?

At Bullhorn, we have found that a high-quality onboarding processOpens a new window can reduce new hire onboarding time by 60 percent. This time savings translates to financial savings as well; when firms better integrate the hiring and onboarding processes, they can increase their gross margins through increased efficiency. Paperwork savings realized through an integrated process also translates monetarily.

More importantly, maintaining relationships through every part of the hiring and onboarding process is everything to a recruiting organization. Break these relationships and you not only have a bad experience for the candidate, but they are likely to tell everyone they know about their negative encounter, further compounding potential recruiting difficulties. Stated as a benefit: the better the candidate experience, the happier the employee, and the longer they stay, reducing talent acquisition costs through retention. This is true for temporary staffing agencies, as contract employees return for additional engagements, as well as for corporations hiring directly.

Learn more: How Great Onboarding Can Provide Certainty For Uncertain EmployeesOpens a new window

People and technology make the relationship between recruiting and onboarding closer

Coordinate and integrate staff: While you may have different people performing separate tasks for the phases of the hiring and onboarding processes, that does not mean they need to operate as siloed teams. How does your organization collaborate? Are the functions merged departmentally, or is there regular coordination as part of the process? The better your organizational coordination, the better the candidate experience.

Integrate your ATS and onboarding technology: Traditionally, there has been a meaningful gap between solutions for applicant tracking and those for onboarding paperwork and communications. Again, thinking of the candidate as a single person can help staffing agencies and companies manage the process, start to finish, as one. In this case, tying the supporting technology together – preferably in a single platform – makes for easy handoff of candidate information, allows for faster communications such as email, and prevents time-hogging problems such as duplicated form-filling.

Using a platform that merges ATS and onboarding functions also helps recruiters spend more time on the human side of their work

Staffing organizations and hiring organizations have an opportunity to improve their operations by thinking of the candidate’s experience as one event, from recruiting to onboarding. Through a combination of organizational and technological coordination, recruiting professionals can make their jobs easier while making the candidates’ experience seamless and positive, increasing savings in time, financial, and replacement costs.

Learn more: You’ve Recruited the Best Candidates: Here’s How to Keep ThemOpens a new window

Mitesh Ashar
Mitesh Ashar

Senior Vice President, Bullhorn

Mitesh Ashar is Senior Vice President, Product Management, at Bullhorn, responsible for product strategy, management & operations across the Bullhorn product portfolio. Mitesh has diverse experience spanning 25+ years in software development and recruiting. His previous roles at Bullhorn in the Services organization include managing client implementations and helping them maximize their ROI on the platform. Prior to joining Bullhorn, Mitesh spent over a decade in the Staffing & Recruiting business in various roles including Recruiting, Sales, Operations and Management. Mitesh holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics and an MBA from the University of Mumbai, India.
Take me to Community
Do you still have questions? Head over to the Spiceworks Community to find answers.