Onboarding and avoiding Miss‐Hires: better referred to as “New Employees We Have Failed”. A white paper by Adrian Harvey, CEO, Elephants don’t forget In this short paper we will look at why an expensive sub‐set of new recruits fail to become productive, valued and loyal employees and explore an award‐winning application that the French automotive giant, Faurecia, has deployed to successfully mitigate many of the own goals scored by most employers when on‐boarding their new recruits. To make the point, we also coin a new phrase: “New Employees We Have Failed”, as an alternative to the accepted industry term, “miss‐hire”. As more firms emerge from the recession that has gripped the global economy and begin once again to actively recruit, so the issues of recruitment effectiveness and inevitably on‐boarding of new employees raises its head. Put succinctly, all the evidence would point to the fact that firms big and small alike struggle with effectively on‐boarding new recruits and it costs the employer, the unfortunate miss‐hire, and the existing employee base significantly. There are numerous reasons (and excuses) for why almost 25% of all new recruits leave within the first year but many of them are avoidable. If you are recruiting and you have anything other than a perfect first year retention profile, you may be well advised to invest 5 minutes of your valuable time on this paper. It could be the biggest ROI you get this year. Most of us can, if we try, remember back to our first day at a new school. Or perhaps the experience was so traumatic for you that you have repressed that memory and done your best to forget it? The truth is, whilst many of us actually (secretly perhaps) enjoyed school, the process of joining a new one, particularly if you were doing so on your own without your friends from the lower school, was difficult. The vast majority of us want to do our best and to have a meaningful existence. Indeed, since the very beginning we have been genetically programmed to "master" our environment. Pack animals at heart, we are happiest when we feel 'part of something' or when we 'belong' and when we can 'contribute'. If you think about it, in your first day at big school or, more relevantly, in your first days/weeks at a new employer, you do not belong. You are only peripherally part of something because right then, you can't contribute; put candidly, you don't know what you are doing! You know this, as do your new colleagues and your new boss. It doesn't really matter what your job function is, even CEO's turn up on day one unable to meaningfully contribute and in desperate "Rapid Learning Mode" (RLM). Your employer wants you to become productive as soon as possible and you do too because you want those negative feelings to go away. You crave the point where you feel you belong; where you know your input is valuable and that you are contributing. Basically, both employer and employee want the same things and want them to occur as quickly as possible. This is why most organisations, doubtless like your own, invest time and money in creating induction programs and "on‐boarding" their new recruits. They have 'buddying' programs where new recruits are partnered with a time‐served employee who is on hand to show them the ropes. Some firms even have 'nurseries' where new recruits spend the first few weeks of work‐life with other new recruits, learning as much as they can as quickly as possible. All these programs, resources and processes are designed to deliver one thing: a happy, productive employee as quickly as possible. A recent report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) revealed that 13% of leavers had less than six months service with their company. And according to another recent survey carried out by Sharlyn Lauby at HR Bartender “companies lose 25% of all new employees within a year, largely due to bad on‐boarding” Far too many new, role‐experienced, employees join organisations only to leave a small number of months later, disgruntled and unhappy. Some are pushed because they can't do the job, others leave of their own volition because they hate it enough that they are willing to go through the stress and trauma of changing jobs again in the hopes of finding somewhere they do "belong". Some firms are more susceptible than others but most large employers will actively measure and record their "miss‐hire" rate. Why? Because miss‐hires, referred to by the resourcing/recruitment industry as early leavers, costs the employer dearly. Try Googling "costs of Miss‐hire" and you will be presented with countless theories and formulae for calculating the ‘true costs of a miss‐hire’. The simple and unarguable fact is miss hires are very expensive. The same CIPD article noted that “UK businesses are losing up to £2bn a year in employee productivity due to inefficient staff induction processes, according to new research”.
The challenge therefore is what, if anything, can be done to reduce your miss hire rate? Perhaps first, a little reflection is required. The very term "miss‐hire" should inevitably be dropped and replaced with "New Employees We Have Failed". That may seem a little blunt, but let's not avoid the harsh reality, unless your recruitment processes are so flawed that you are literally taking on "anyone with a pulse", then the chances are the raw material coming into your business is entirely suited and qualified for the role for which they have been employed. Therefore one might argue that they cannot be a miss‐hire. If you subscribe to the fact that your resourcing function/recruitment processes are pretty robust, then the cause of early leaving must be about what happens to these new employees AFTER they have joined your business. Specifically, those formative first few months in your organization where employees make up their minds if they want to be part of your world. The theory is straight forward. Basically new recruit failed to feel that they belonged in your world. They failed to contribute as much as they felt they could or should have or to the degree they saw others contributing. They then reach a critical point, often very early in their new employ, where they conclude your business isn't for them. At that point the majority of new recruits are beyond saving and are now on an exit path from your business. This exit path may take months or longer, but the damage is done and this new recruit is almost certainly doomed to under‐perform their potential during the remainder of their time with your business. According to somewhat older research by Recruitment Solutions in April 2007, “47% of employee turnover occurs within the first 90 days of employment, with 60% of respondents highlighting induction improvements as a priority area for investment”. Other research points to “25% of new starters making the decision in their first week that they no longer want to work with the company”; again, a poor induction process to blame “with many feeling overwhelmed, bored or confused”. If you follow the logic, miss‐hires are more often than not the fault of the employer, not the employee. There is no argument that the new recruit has a duty to try, to do their best, to work hard and to fit in but the employer holds the key. Generally speaking the hiring manager is the greatest cause of discontent amongst new recruits. Mike Myatt, writing in Forbes, late 2012, noted that of employees he had interviewed “More than 40% don’t respect the person they report to”. Clearly there are many exceptions. If you hire a new recruit into a busy team at peak demand, irrespective of the hiring manager’s capability and experience, the hiring manager is almost certainly going to fail to provide the levels of support that the new recruit expects. They simply do not have the time or bandwidth to do so. Equally some of the back up processes built into your on‐boarding process, like buddy systems, also fail at times of peak demand as the buddies are also flat out and unable to provide the help and support the new recruit needs. What's worse, feeling unsupported in an on‐boarding process doesn't need to last for very long before the new recruit concludes that they are unloved here and so begins the destructive process of hardening the heart towards you as an employer and exit planning. It may not be just that the hiring manager is busy. Some hiring managers are just poor coaches. Others struggle to identify where a new recruit is struggling, so do not provide coaching and guidance in the right areas. Other hiring managers may not know enough about what they should be doing when a new recruit joins their team. Generally they have been trained, but do they really know what they should be doing and when? Alastair Cartwright of Ingenium Solutions, a recruitment industry expert, who trains many of the FTSE in‐house resourcing teams how to recruit and resource more efficiently and effectively commented: “Many hiring managers lack a combination of time, skills, data and knowledge to be a truly effective part of a new recruit’s on‐boarding process” . Given the huge impact a hiring manager has on their employees’ decisions to stay/go, this is a sorry state of affairs and one that many firms struggle to even identify, let alone rectify. Faurecia, global 1st tier automotive supplier (6th largest in the world) with headquarters in France with more than 100k employees around the world, recognized that effective on‐boarding held the key to minimizing miss‐hires or ‘New Employees We Have Failed’. Faurecia invests heavily in employee knowledge and competency because they underpin their competitive advantage, have created a structured and supportive 6‐month on‐boarding program for any new employee – and their manager – joining their business. Dean Woods, Corporate Training Manager commented: “We had designed a great process that gave the new recruit all the information that they needed to become an effective and fully functioning member of the Faurecia team. It worked brilliantly when it was deployed as designed. The trouble was that for a variety of legitimate reasons, the on‐boarding process wasn’t consistently applied, even in the same territory, even in the same team, sometimes even by the same manager! The result was that we ended up with sub‐optimal results. We needed a mechanic that applied our known successful processes consistently, almost irrespective of the availability, capability and competency of the new recruit’s hiring manager, or of any local peak demand pressures the business was experiencing”. If we accept the premise that the hiring manager has the greatest impact on the success of a new recruit and that there are many and various influences on a hiring manager’s relative effectiveness and ability to support that new recruit, then perhaps we should be looking to better help and support the hiring manager in the on‐boarding process. Note we say ‘help’, not do their job for them. Faurecia hires more than 2,000 employees every year and recognized that things had to be done differently, so in early 2014 they set about automating their proven successful on‐boarding process. Working with the team from Elephants don’t forget they mapped their on‐boarding process into Clever Nelly with the goals of: 
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Ensuring that every new employee received a guaranteed consistent on‐boarding process irrespective of where they were recruited in the world and the pressures facing that BU/site at that time. Ensuring managers know the next steps ahead of time to enable them to be proactive and prepared. Flagging early warning signs of where a new recruit was struggling with the training material and needed additional help, support, coaching. Collecting accurate and meaningful emotional feedback from recruits during the on‐boarding process so that dissatisfaction could be captured, the drivers identified and where appropriate, interventions triggered that could resolve the dissatisfaction. Ensuring that every new recruit completing their on‐boarding has genuinely learned what we need then to learn to be able to excel in their role post on‐boarding. “Since that day, we have put more than 600 new employees, spread across our global operations, through the new supportive process. Every single one of them has embarked on precisely the same induction and on‐boarding, tailored for their role. Every single one of them, irrespective of how busy their local operation and hiring manager is, has received constant, automated support in an unobtrusive and enjoyable way. We have received automated notification and early warning where an employee is not feeling adequately supported in a way that historically would have been denied us. As a result we have been able to gently intervene and where possible ‘save’ that recruit”. Clever Nelly’s on‐boarding application is already an award‐winning and recognized ground breaking solution having won a Gold Stevie in 2014. It is perhaps too soon to draw the conclusion that the Elephants don’t forget on‐boarder application has solved the miss‐hire challenges historically experienced at Faurecia, however, Faurecia is certainly reaping early rewards from the deployment. “The data presented to us by the application is so detailed, so precise and so consistent we have taken the decision to include some of the data‐points in our global Internal Audit scorecard so we can monitor this critical success factor throughout our business. We now also have the ability to compare and contrast the relative effectiveness of different parts of our business and can precisely identify where local management/resourcing are weak and where it is strong so we can intervene accordingly”. Elephants don’t forget set out to provide a universally applicable, multi‐lingual, low cost application that resourcing professionals could tailor to meet their specific organizational and industry requirements that could easily bolt‐on to their existing practices. It wasn’t about having employers change what they do or force management to do things differently. It was about automatically plugging the gaps, ensuring consistency and providing management and resourcing professionals with early warning systems and precise data that they could then act on to drive performance improvement through their practices and processes. “Since the launch of Nelly a year ago, all we have heard is great feedback and Elephants don’t forget has been able to customize the offering to deal with specific regional and sub‐set requirements. Given our scale, it is not yet possible to put a figure on what impact the On‐boarding tool has had on miss‐hire reductions, but suffice to say this tool is now part of our DNA, part of “Being Faurecia”, because even the most competent and experienced hiring manager needs a helping hand from time to time. Nelly is always there making sure everything we want to happen, does happen, and happens when it needs to, letting us know as soon as potential issues arise”. More details about Clever Nelly and her onboarding application can be sourced from NELLY@ELEPHANTSDONTFORGET. COM About Elephants don’t forget Elephants don’t forget, home of multi‐award winning Clever Nelly are the global leaders in knowledge retention. Operation in 16 countries in numerous languages, Clever Nelly provides precise, continual insight into actual employee capability and competence and gently repairs individual employee knowledge & competence gaps as she discovers them.