So you’re adding a new member to your team — congrats!

The first step to ensure that your perfect candidate becomes a perfect employee is planning the perfect first day.

When the new hire walks through the door on day one, you have two main objectives – first,to make them feel like part of the team right from the start and second, to ramp them up as quickly as possible so they can start adding value to the business.

Therein lies an age-old problem: how do you make onboarding simple, engaging, and useful, especially when your new hire may be coming in with little or no experience of your organization or even your industry?

At too many organizations, onboarding requires new hires to sit through a day or more’s worth of talks from existing team members and executives – everyone giving an overview of their specialty by way of a short introduction.

But these sessions often overwhelm new hires, leaving them little hope of remembering anything but scattershot detail. And for teams that onboard frequently, such a routine can also be a burden on existing staff that have to block time out of their busy schedules to take part.

The takeaway from employee orientation sessions is usually a heavy handbook that typically gets put into a drawer and never referred to again. The subsequent weeks often involve a large amount on-the-job, on-the-spot learning, with few if any resources to help employees retain the deluge of incoming information.

There’s a better way — Video.

More and more companies are using multimedia recordings as a key part of the induction and onboarding process, supplementing the traditional face-to-face elements.

Some of our customers have found that creating on-demand video recordings of presentations for new hires offers significant benefits:

• For a start, it means that even if a current member of staff isn’t available on the main orientation day to deliver a talk, they can still share information with new hires in an engaging way.
• Rather than new hires attempting to assimilate unmanageable amounts of information in their first few days and weeks, they can refer to recordings of training sessions whenever, wherever to recap key points.
• The CEO and other leading members of the business (even if they’re not based in the same office, or even the same country) can provide a welcome message outlining the company vision, helping new hires feel part of a company culture from the very beginning.
• And learning that would usually take place on-the-job ‘as and when’ can instead be replaced with recordings that cover key company processes, approaches and modes of working.

It often takes new hires months to truly ramp in their role. Organizations that use video recordings make the learning curve more manageable, providing better support to their new staff and reaping tangible gains in productivity, satisfaction and retention.

Using a tool like Panopto means that these recordings can be saved to a searchable video library and watched as needed so that new hires can review what they learned from their colleagues. Video can also be used by internal subject matter experts to gear up new colleagues quickly and in a more personal way that merely sending them a report or set of documents.

Ready to see how Panopto can help improve your onboarding process? Contact our team today for a free trial.