Best Practices, Challenges and Trends in Employee Onboarding for BPOs

Employee Onboarding effectiveness defines whether your employee will be engaged or disengaged at work, depending on the impression created on them.

Poorly managed onboarding can lead to abandonment, especially for youngsters. According to an SHRM article:

• 69% of employees stay longer with good onboarding
• A structured onboarding program will make 58% of employees stay up to 3 years in a company
• Standardization in onboarding processes will allow new hires in an organization to be 50% more productive

India’s emergence as a global outsourcing hub sheds light on the contribution of the BPO industry in terms of development and innovation. The abundance of skilled talent has been a captivating factor for companies which are responsible for placing our country on the map and making it a major outsourcing destination. However, there are many challenges involved in employee onboarding in the BPO industry.

Isn’t it important to provide a flawless onboarding experience to the workforce that is likely to determine the future of outsourcing? 

Of Course, it is!

Thus it is substantial for the HR team and the respective managers of any organization to ensure the smooth onboarding of the new hire but there are significant roadblocks to this process.

Here are some major employee onboarding challenges for the BPO industry

1. Prolonged Process

Onboarding is a long-drawn process. Processing the documents of numerous candidates within a short period of time is almost impossible in the traditional method of submitting, collecting and verifying the necessary documents and records. Thus tentative lags are caused in the process which may lead to job-hopping by potential employees. 

2. Compiling Documentation

The post-interview process of collecting relevant documents from candidates and maintaining a repository of the same becomes a tedious task for BPOs. On the other hand, the absence of a concrete solution to maintain documentation of potential employees can lead to a lapse in HR audit trails.

3. High Employee Turnover

A high attrition rate is one of the major challenges of the BPO industry. This predicament demands frequent hiring and thus frequent onboarding which is a time-consuming process. As a result, it leads to a loss of time, resources and effort.

Since primary evaluation, screening, and background checks act as the first interactions with the employees, Identity Verification and Document Verification play a key deciding role in the initial onboarding process.

The pandemic had a huge effect on the way employee onboarding processes work, we saw a huge shift towards remote digital onboarding.

And the census reports suggest that we won’t be going back to the old ways either, 82% of workers prefer digital means of onboarding and document verification for ease of application and document transfer. 

So it is then required to streamline the process of onboarding digitally as much as possible, using the latest technologies to provide a comprehensive identity verification experience. 

As expected, digital onboarding provides a quicker alternative to traditional employee onboarding methods, and the most strides are taken in the steps of document and identity verification. These days, API-based solutions such as IDcentral provide easy access to an arsenal of identity and document verification tools, technology and databases that span countries over. Using these advanced solutions eases manual effort, prevents bias, catches fraud in the initial stages and reduces lengthy employee onboarding processes. Additionally, AML and PEP screening can also be integrated be frictionless with the rest of the onboarding flow. 

Best Practices in Employee Onboarding for BPOsUsing Powerful Onboarding tools

With an advanced customer centric, digital employee screening solutions for hybrid and remote workplaces, you can conduct background checks for your employees at scale. Whether it’s instant ID verification, education verification, reference checks, or digital address verification for employees, automation, simple integration, and data security will power your employee verification and onboarding process at every step. Technologies such as optical character recognition (OCR), image recognition, face recognition, document classification, and digital signatures will help your HR function save time and money. This makes your background screening process more efficient, scalable, and secure.

Secure collection and timely verification of IDs

With end-to-end identity checks that include real-time dashboards and actionable insights on employee data, you can create a 10x faster verification and onboarding experience for your employees. Technologies like Face Match and Liveness Detection ensure the quickest turnaround time, allowing you to scale up quickly and save up to 70% on onboarding time and operational costs.

Trends in Employee Onboarding Continued Evolution in Remote & Hybrid Onboarding 

Compliance, clarification, culture, and connection – the Four C’s of traditional onboarding – also apply to remote or hybrid onboarding. It’s usually the latter two that suffer. According to a survey, 60% of HR managers had to adapt to remote employee onboarding. Thus creating a vacuum for solutions and new methods to compensate for the lack of in-person onboarding practices.

Using digital identity verification tools, HRs can quickly speed up the verification processes alleviating time to be spent on more group interactions and introductions into the company work culture.

Post-pandemic Re-Onboarding of employees

If you’re wondering why so many employees are leaving your company, it’s most likely due to a poor re-onboarding experience.

Reboarding or re-onboarding employees means reacquainting them with your organization’s culture and their team. This is accomplished by guiding them through a modified onboarding process designed for a remote work model.
Unfortunately, most businesses, by their own admission, pay little to no attention to their onboarding or reboarding processes.

Using existing data to verify the documents and recheck compliance can be a breeze with the latest identity management solutions like IDcentral. With the existing record of employee and easily accessible government databases with single-click APIs, employee reonboarding can be finished in a jiffy with a larger portion of the process being used for communication and not documentation, admission or compliance background checks.

More Inclusive Onboarding Programs

Studies have repeatedly shown that diversity makes us smarter, more creative, and more diligent. Hiring practises take it into account, but most onboarding programmes are focused on time-to-productivity.

While most HR professionals measure time-to-productivity because it is efficient, onboarding should be about lifetime productivity. And inclusive onboarding programmes are a great way to do so.

Helping create a no-bias onboarding platform can be difficult due to the number of factor involved, using a solution that takes bias in consideration can be a game changer in making new employees feel welcome. Equal opportunity of being able to access the same onboarding workflow and benefits is to be ensured by HRs, for this function to be carried out without irresolution, the use of onboarding solutions can help, by removing the human bias aspect of it all, and helping all employees be verified and onboarded with equal countenance throughout.

Automated Onboarding

According to a survey of 1,500 employees, 40% of new hires believe it takes too long to get answers from HR. Automated employee onboarding flows reduces time HRs spend on repetitive processes like document verification and identity proofing, allowing the company to more meaningfully engage new hires.

Digital onboarding does not have to be monotonous. Having an active comment section under training resources, as well as a dedicated Slack or Teams channel, encourages peer-to-peer learning.

Artificial Intelligence based onboarding

Artificial intelligence chatbots are digitally transforming the recruiting and hiring processes. They are intended to answer frequently asked questions, send automated reminders, and notify new hires about upcoming training sessions.

But it goes further than that. Having a digital document verification process rather than an in-person document check allows new hires to complete their onboarding at their own pace. This saves time and money, and it undoubtedly improves the overall employee experience.
With the rise of remote work, unstructured ID and documents needs to be transferred and can quickly become lost in translation. Using AI-enabled OCR document verification technology like the one from IDcentral helps quickly extract and verify details seamlessly.