Why I'm here...

What the heck is onboarding, anyway? It's the term now being used for the entire hiring and orientation process--that is, what are the activities needed to get a new employee on board in your organization?

At CCPL, we're thinking about reinventing our onboarding process. We want to take advantage of our technology resources, of course. And we want to be able to compete with other employers who are making it easy for people to apply for jobs AND get up to speed once they're hired!

There are some other potential benefits, too. We now spend a great deal of time in face-to-face orientation sessions with new staff.

• Face-to-face may be an optimistic way to describe some of these sessions, though--after a day of meeting people and seeing several PowerPoint presentations, pity the poor new staff member!! Wouldn't it be great if people could access the information they need, when they need it?
• What about the amount of staff time spent in conducting new staff orientations? Wouldn't it be great if a presenter could make their content available once--and then focus their time with new staff on answering questions or filling in gaps?
• The content we share with new staff might be interesting to other staff, too! From time to time our staff have asked for a 'who does what' directory. Having departmental content online could help to address this need.