Case study:

Development of a hybrid onboarding experience for new hires

Who are the client?

What was the challenge or ask?

Hunter AHP is a start-up recruitment firm within the ‘Hunter Gatherer’ Group. Specialists in recruiting professionals across a range of clinical specialities such as physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy.

The agency was growing rapidly and they needed to increase their headcount. This meant bringing in less experienced appointments who needed to be “taught the ropes”.

New employees would have a one-day induction, which covered the basics, but the skills required to be successful were mostly taught on the job or through 1:1 guidance with their line manager.

This resulted in several challenges:

  • Development was time consuming: Line managers had to spent a lot of time getting someone upto speed
  • Skills would be different depending on who onboarded them or how much time they had with their manager
  • Line managers were trying to deliver their own work and onboard new members of staff
  • Turnover was a risk: If individuals weren’t being given the skills that they need to be successful, they risked higher turnover rates

The business knew they needed to design a slicker process, and that self-directed learning would be key to that. They already had a learning engagement platform in place (Learn Amp), but it wasn’t being used and no one had the spare time or the expertise in virtual learning to develop the content for it.

What did we do?

In order to inform the development of the content, we wanted to ensure it was as relevant as possible to the managers and employees of Hunter AHP who would be using it.

We collated the learning content that already existed and reviewed it before going onto interview team members who had either undergone an onboarding recently or were involved in upskilling new employees to find out what worked well and not so well.

What were the outcomes?

A new onboarding schedule

As a start-up operating in a competitive and fast-paced industry, an effective onboarding process was critical to ensuring new hires were bought up to speed as quickly as possible, whilst ensuring key members of the team weren’t taken away from their own delivery.

Rather than a heavily directed induction and subsequent reliance on the line manager to fill gaps, a two-week onboarding was introduced that included a blend of directed and self-led learning.

This gave the employee the best chance to get started quickly, without being wholly dependent on their line manager. We redesigned the existing onboarding schedule so each day had a clear focus that aligned to the competency framework created – such as ‘Marketing’ or ‘Candidate Engagement’.

A custom competency framework

We started by defining the competency areas of the business based on interviews with the leadership team, and experience working with other recruitment firms.

Having clearly defined competency areas gave team leaders and employees a clear way to structure content and measure what matters to success.

Once the competency framework was in place, identifying opportunities to improve the existing content used for onboarding staff was easier. 

Bespoke learning materials

Recruiters can be hard to keep engaged! So the training content needed to be short, sharp, and varied. The Hunter AHP team already had some brilliant training content from staff inductions to use as a starting point, but it required refining to meet the business’s evolving needs and to be suitable for self-led training.

A custom channel was made on their learning management system (Learn Amp) for the onboarding process, featuring eight key topics and almost 50 learning resources – some of which were refined versions of existing content, and some was designed from scratch. 

The content included a mixture of documents, text, and quizzes to make the learning experience enjoyable and varied for the new employee.

One of the most important things was making sure the content didn’t just feel professional, but that it reflected the Hunter AHP brand. We reformatted every document and created custom visuals and pictures so the content looked and felt like it wasn’t out of place.

Accessible content

There’s nothing worse than out of date content. With the business evolving so quickly, we knew it was important that team leaders could keep the content up to date without being reliant on us.

We shared every original image, document, and file (over 170 files!) on a cloud-based folder so they could access them anytime.

If you are interested in finding out how Hatching Ideas could support your organisation – get in touch with us.

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