How Onboard Express Reduces Admin Work & Creates a Seamless Hiring Process

Almost 444,400 Australians joined the workforce last year. However, recruiting benchmarks show that the number of applicants per role was 11% below the global average. Australian offer acceptance rates were also 5% lower.

These figures mean organisations must think smarter to secure top talent, including optimising their hiring and onboarding experiences. Making a great first impression on prospective employees engages them from the start and demonstrates that you truly value their contributions to the business.

Are large administrative workloads and slow manual processes getting in the way? With 10+ years of experience optimising onboarding, Onboard Express can help. Learn how our purpose-built platform can build a seamless hiring process for your company.

What Are the Benefits of a Seamless Hiring Process?

Seamless hiring processes benefit HR teams by offering fast, streamlined onboarding that quickly secures and retains top talent. They also significantly reduce the time spent on hiring and onboarding, leading to lower costs and happier, more engaged candidates.

Effective hiring processes can help you:

Retain Top Talent

Positive hiring and onboarding processes engage new hires from the beginning of their journey. 

Thorough organisational welcomes and training ensure employees understand the job requirements and feel part of the workplace culture. These processes teach employees the importance of their role in supporting the company’s mission, motivating them for their first day.

A great hiring experience also helps to build overall perceptions of your organisation. Seamless recruitment, from the application form to onboarding, with strong communication maintained throughout, makes good first impressions. New hires will see your company as one that cares about delivering an engaging employee experience.

Employees who feel highly engaged from the beginning are more likely to stay long-term to help fulfil your company’s mission. That’s why 52% of employers experience higher retention rates after improving their onboarding practices!

Fill Workforce Gaps

72% of employees share their poor hiring experiences online or with another person directly. These negative reviews can put prospective candidates off applying for roles at your organisation altogether.

However, if they’ve had a positive experience and therefore feel connected to the company culture, employees are six times more likely to recommend your organisation to others. This builds your reputation as a great employer, helping you attract and secure first-choice candidates.

From powerful contract generation to automated reviews, seamless onboarding experiences involving automations also increase time to hire. These automations allow employers to quickly fill empty positions without sacrificing highly-skilled, talented staff.

“At a time when high-quality talent is scarce, a highly professional first impression, speed in making the offer, and a positive employee experience are essential.” 

As explained by Ryan Ray, General Manager of Culture and Capability at UnitingCare Queensland, effective onboarding is especially beneficial for high-turnover industries. This includes aged care, which faces a shortage of at least 110,000 workers within the next decade.

Reduce Costs

The average cost to hire an employee doubled to $23,860 in 2021 and continues to grow today. By boosting time-to-productivity, seamless recruitment and onboarding processes can reduce these figures.

Automations speed up the completion of vital onboarding paperwork while ensuring accuracy and compliance. They also help organisations deliver thorough training and workplace inductions that prepare new hires for faster day-one readiness. The quicker employees are work-ready, the faster your organisation can begin benefiting from a return on its initial investment into their hiring and training.

Replacing manual workloads with automations also means fewer financial resources are spent on the administrative side of hiring and onboarding. Onboard Express, for instance, can reduce onboarding costs by up to 80%!

Instead, the time and money saved can be invested in creating engaging onboarding experiences that truly integrate new hires into your company culture.

How Onboard Express Eliminates the Admin Burden

Onboard Express’s comprehensive software eliminates the administrative burden by streamlining the hiring and onboarding experiences. 

The following automated tools replace manual workflows to save time and engage candidates quickly, creating seamless processes that attract and retain the best candidates:

Streamlined Contract Creation

Onboard Express’s dynamic document assembly tool creates and issues personalised employment contracts. Pre-made contract templates are ready to be customised with your brand fonts and logo, with HR teams simply needing to:

• Enter the candidate’s personal, residential, contact, position, and start date details. The tool then automatically pre-populates the relevant fields. 
• These details only need to be entered once and can then be applied to all employment forms and policies. 
• Switch specific pages or clauses on and off, and automated workflows instantly apply new rates to all relevant contracts.

This tool saves valuable admin time, while automated calculations also reduce the risk of errors.

UnitingCare Queensland needed to recruit hundreds of new staff to support 460 aged care locations across Australia. Their current all-in-one software wasn’t fast enough to meet tight deadlines, which is why they chose Onboard Express’s advanced contract construction engine.

Along with ensuring a consistent and compliant process, UnitingCare reduced the time elapsed to onboard a new employee through to payroll from 2 weeks to just 2 days. They also minimised the admin burden on HR staff and created a compliant, professional employee experience.

Automated Reviews and Approvals

Once employee documents and onboarding documents are completed, Onboard Express automatically sends them to the relevant departments and team members for review.

Advanced review workflows facilitate a multi-step check process to ensure all key details are included before these documents reach the candidate. They’re then sent straight to a personalised onboarding portal, where candidates can complete the onboarding process online via secure e-signatures without being in the office.

The biggest benefit? Speed. Replacing paper contracts, which can easily get lost or damaged, with online documents means the entire process takes days rather than weeks. HR teams have a smaller hiring workload, and candidates aren’t left waiting around, enhancing engagement. 

This is something Southern Cross Care experienced after implementing Onboard Express. The aged care organisation lowered offer creation through to acceptance time by 80%, from over a week to 1.5 days. They were also able to:

• Switch paper forms for faster online workflows.
• Simplify the contract change processes and move changes to payroll with one click.
• Reduce the time for payroll processing, ensuring candidates are ready for the next pay run.
• Improve compliance and accuracy of salary and conditions changes.
• Integrate the platform with current Jobadder recruitment, IT middleware, and Preceda payroll systems.
  

Mobile Workflows

By supporting fast mobile onboarding, using Onboard Express means no more waiting around for HR teams to be back at their desks.

Mobile-friendly hiring processes are also more appealing to job seekers. Mobile applications surpassed desktop applications for the first time in 2020. 67% of job applications were completed on mobile devices in 2021, and this number continues growing today.

Implementing mobile onboarding workflows also shows you support flexible working, which is now a priority for many candidates. 46% of workers surveyed in a Job Seeker Nation report say they’re seeking a new job that provides more flexible opportunities. 32% have declined offers in the past 12 months due to limited remote working.

60% of candidates say better communication during and after the application process would make the most positive impact. Onboard Express’s automated mobile workflows and secure onboarding portals help maintain this communication, ensuring all relevant parties are kept in the loop with hiring progress from wherever they are.

Easy Compliance

Complying with industry and government regulations is often complex, especially when they’re constantly evolving. New regulations mean HR teams, who already have large workloads, must manually make changes to contracts. This also impacts candidates, with long hiring and onboarding processes ahead of them.

Onboard Express automatically applies compliance updates to the relevant documents to eliminate this manual admin workload. Other key compliance features include:

• Digital agreements, which reduce compliance risks by providing a full audit trail. 
• Strong passwords and multi-factor authentication ensure a secure cloud environment.
• Secure online portals keep all recruitment documents in one place, ensuring you’re always audit-ready.

Onboard Express helped WSP, one of the world’s leading engineering consulting firms, manage multiple acquisitions. The software efficiently onboarded new employees while complying with local regulations, including those from New Zealand and the Philippines, and easily adapted to the growing organisation’s compliance needs.

Easy compliance is especially beneficial for heavily regulated industries like health and aged care. Employee background and qualification checks add time to he hiring process, but are crucial for ensuring organisations can deliver the quality person-centred care their clients deserve. 

Infinite Aged Care benefited from Onboard Express’s instant work rights verification checks, which are embedded into the platform via the Department of Home Affairs’ VEVO system. This system helped them maintain compliant processes and lowered onboarding time to 45 minutes. They also beat technology giants like Deloitte and Optus to win Best Tech Stack at the ITAs!

Create Seamless Hiring and Onboarding Processes for Your Organisation

Today’s competitive hiring market means rethinking recruitment and onboarding processes to prioritise candidate needs. By achieving this, organisations can enhance efficiency, attract first-choice candidates, and retain them in the long term.

Ready to optimise onboarding? Contact Onboard Express today and we’ll explain how our automated workflows eliminate the admin burden and help HR teams thrive.