About Australia Post:
Australia Post is a complex organisation of 35,000+ employees across Retail, Logistics, Digital and Corporate role families. Continuous improvement of these services is our relentless objective.
OUR PROBLEM:
Across Australia Post’s diverse workforces, one of the biggest and most frequent pain points that the Recruitment function heard about was the new starter experience; and most frequently from our corporate role families.
The feedback varied across a range of issues comprising pre-employment checks, slow arrival of letters of offer, low/no pre-start engagement and planning for day one, timeliness of first pay, timely arrival of equipment and building access.
Both managers and new starters were feeling the negative impact on their overall recruitment experience – and yet none of these issues sat within the traditional remit of the Recruitment function to solve.
OUR INITIATIVE:
By deploying a design approach to uncovering the issues and designing an ideal future state, Recruitment was able to bring a holistic lens to the end to end new starter experience.
OUR PROCESS:
This research entailed desk top reviews of satisfaction surveys and process data, shadowing users and conducting focus groups. It allowed us to understand the key jobs to be done by each user, to isolate pain points, and co-design an ideal state.
These recommendations then underwent prioritisation from a user, root cause logic, technical difficulty & cost lens to establish the roadmap and business case.
Fig. 1: Roadmap to the new starter business case.
This resulted in collaboration across seven separate functions (HR, Recruitment, Rem & Bens, Comms, IT, Real Estate, L&D) to launch a new solution– for our corporate new starters initially – which drove the following key changes:
From:
- Slow and manual approval processes including hard copy documents with wet signatures and a ‘start again’ approach in the frequent case of errors followed up with a second hard copy form to shared services
- Hard copy offer letters and contracts that take too long to deliver and are a bit ‘old school’
- Ad hoc levels of pre-start engagement from manager and team, leaving new starters feeling uncertain about day one
- Inability to order IT equipment & access before day one, resulting in up to three weeks of non-productivity and lots of forms to fill in
- Not having a security pass on day one and relying on colleagues to collect you from front desk for up to three weeks
- Induction characterised by compliance learning and little else.
To:
- Automation and digitisation: Instant, online approval process for managers and same day digital offers.
- Improved engagement: Easy to execute prompts for managers to engage regularly and relevantly from offer all the way to probation.
- Ready for day one: photo ID, preferential equipment and access to key software all ready and waiting on day one.
- Induction characterised by clear expectation setting, meeting relevant people, getting out to the rest of the business – and compliance learning!
OUR RESULTS:
Fig. 2:
Our new experience has proved extremely popular, with further roll outs and greater investment approved for implementation. By focusing on the desired experience, underpinned by prioritised features, and enabled by changes to technology, we have successfully transformed onboarding into an experience that delights our people.
Our new starter feedback has improved three-fold: they feel valued, can add value quickly, and know what to expect.
“This is the best onboarding experience I have ever been through; I’ve definitely made the right decision to join.”
OUR %$#@ UP:
While the candidate experience was radically improved with some simple front end workflow and communications and content plan, the back end – which impacted the managers more – needed more work to make it a universal success.
WRAP UP:
Our managers are really pleased with the step change too; both for themselves and their new starters. With more investment planned, our intent is to improve their user experience still further by refining the underlying process and technology landscape.
If your onboarding experience is suffering from a similar challenge, don’t hesitate to contact rebecca.houghton@boldhr.com.au to find out more.
Do you have a Talent story to share? Drop us a note at info@atcevents.com.au with a brief summary and we’ll get back to you!
ATC2019 is all about exploring high performance Talent functions and the elements necessary for Talent Acquisition (TA) to thrive as we enter the age of intelligence. Get your tickets here.
