I am excited to see organizations do deliberate and organized onboarding of their new hires. Preparing these employees from the start to be successful in their role helps to produce more successful and productive employees who generally want to stay around longer.
There are many steps to successful onboarding. Some of the basic items in an effective onboarding program include, but is not limited to:
- Preparations before the starting day
- Introduction to tools used
- Orientation of the office
- Meeting the team
- Evaluating your employee’s onboarding experience afterwards
A successful onboarding process can include specific activities across weeks and even months.
I’ve been doing some research over the past month to discover if any organizations are including the new hire’s social media presence as a task in the onboarding process. I have not found any companies who do.
Being an increasingly more social society, and because we are using social media more for business, our social presence should be considered as part of the onboarding process.
Here are 9 reasons I encourage companies to include social presence as a part of their onboarding processes for customer facing and prospect facing employees:
- Boost the employees excitement and moral in the new job by helping them boast about their new job on social.
- Help the employee use the best possible keywords and phrases as they announce their new job on social, in their profiles, bios, etc.
- Introduce the new employee to the team, business partners, etc through social announcements, posts, profile updates, connections.
- Confirm the new employee’s social presence no longer promotes their old job/employer, contact information and other irrelevant information.
- Clean up dormant social accounts that can diminish the new employees public presence in their new job.
- Determine how committed the new employee is to their new job based on their desire to update their social presence with new content.
- Introduce the new customer service, sales, business development employee to clients and prospects via their social presence.
- Convert any social profiles written for career transition to focus on the viewers related to the new job.
- Uncover any social media issues that may contradict the employees new job/role.
I love to see the organizations who setup their new employees with SWAG (Stuff We All Get), computer systems, logins, training programs and the tools needed to do their new job as part of the onboarding.
However, the social presence of public facing and or customer/prospect facing employees also need to be addressed as part of the onboarding process to ramp up their success in their new role.
What does your business do with the social presences of your new hires?
What have you tried that did not work well?
I would love to hear your experiences as I continue to research social onboarding of new hires.