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The Shaughnessy Report: A Strong Start

In your current job, what was the onboarding process like? If you’ve been with the same company for decades, you likely didn’t see much of an onboarding process at all.

If you’re lucky, your boss took you out to lunch on the first day. Were you assigned a mentor? Were you welcomed with open arms into your new work family, or were you basically tossed in the pond and told to sink or swim?

The “sink or swim” approach was the rule, not the exception—for most companies, across all industries—because there were always more job-hunters than there were open positions; skilled, degreed, management, you name it, and there was someone to fill it. Hiring managers always had a stack of resumés they could pick through.

But that all changed a few years ago when our Baby Boomer brethren started retiring, with some pulling the pin early because of COVID concerns. This was followed by the start of the “Great Resignation” in November 2021, when 4.5 million working-age adults just bailed out of the workforce. Recently, hiring has outpaced quitting, but we’re still down a few million American workers compared to pre-COVID numbers.

As a result, many companies in our industry are revamping their onboarding processes. They want their new hires to stay for a long time, mostly because they can’t afford to keep playing musical chairs with employees. Staff turnover is costly, so when you hire new employees, you don’t want them leaving nine months later.

The average cost of finding and hiring a new employee is $4,400, according to recent research by the Society for Human Resource Management. That’s an average across all industries; in some electronics companies, when you calculate the cost of recruiting, hiring, process training, safety training, benefits, insurance, and other overhead, that cost is easily in the five figures. Again, this wasn’t a concern when HR had a stack of resumés for each position at the company.

So, what’s the secret to converting a new hire into a long-term employee? As Ventec’s Frank Lorentz has found, satisfied employees are more likely to stay with the company for many years. He goes out of his way to regularly visit with employees, especially new hires. He stays in constant contact with them, especially during their first year. He also assigns them a mentor, and lets them know that it’s okay to fail, because failure is a great teacher. New hires never have to wonder what’s going on or who to talk to when they have questions.

“Keep your employees happy.” It sounds like a cliché, but it seems to be working. The employees that Frank has onboarded are still working there years later. What I really liked was when he pointed out that onboarding starts in the first hour of the employee’s first day.

With that in mind, the April 2023 issue of PCB007 Magazine offers multiple contributors who provide a set of best practices for successful, swift onboarding of new hires, and methodologies for turning new employees into productive, long-term staff. As I’ve mentioned, Frank Lorentz walks us through his onboarding process in detail, and he explains why it’s so important to foster a two-way atmosphere of trust with each employee. We also have feature interviews with corporate advisor John Izzo, IPC training advisor Michael Hoyt, Texas trade school owner Elvia Quintanilla, and HR consultant Brian Wallace.

We have feature articles by Hannah Nelson, IPC’s John W. Mitchell, Dan Beaulieu, Todd Kolmodin, Chris Bonsell, and an interview with Anaya Vardya, as well as columns by Michael Carano, Happy Holden, and David Schild. Each brings a different perspective about onboarding and how and why it’s important.

This issue is packed with information that managers can take advantage of right away. If you’re hiring—and I bet you are—you want the new hires to stay with the company for years, not months. Ready, set, go check it out!

This column appears in the April 2023 issue of PCB007 Magazine.