Collecting Candidate Data - Onboarding Forms

Candidate Data is at the heart of everything you do when processing Applications, carrying out Talent Pooling activities or running reports; so it's really important to ensure you have collected enough information from your candidates to allow you to do what you need to do.

Within Eploy, there are generally 3 stages where you'd typically collect Candidate Data: Registration, Application and Onboarding.

In this article we're going to look at the third stage - Onboarding.

To jump to a specific section in this article, please use the links below:

• Onboarding Forms
• Default Onboarding Forms
• Key Things to Consider
• Completing the Specification Document

Onboarding Forms

As the name implies, Onboarding Forms are used at the end of your Recruitment process and are how you'll gather all of your New Joiner information, provide useful information to your new Employees and, ultimately, get them to accept the offer and sign their contract.

You'll already have gathered a lot of useful information about the Candidate as part of the Registration and Application process and now is the time to get them to confirm that these details are definitely correct (such as their address) and gather any remaining information you'll need for HR, Payroll, Compliance and Background Checking (if applicable) purposes.

To make life easier for your new employees, given the amount of data you'll be asking them to verify or provide, onboarding is typically spread over several pages.  However, rather than simply adding extra pages to a single Form, ideally each page should be a form in its own right.

This serves two purposes:

1. It gives your new employees the opportunity to save their progress and come back to it at a later date.  This can be especially useful if you need them to upload copies of certificates or other documentation
2. It gives you the flexibility to vary the route a new (or existing) employee takes through the onboarding process depending on different conditions. For example, a new employee would be required to complete all onboarding forms, whereas an existing employee might only need to sign their contract.  By having the Contract display on its own form, you can reuse that one form across the board, rather than having to create multiple versions of the same thing.

Default Onboarding Forms

Your new Eploy system will come with several default Onboarding forms "out of the box" and it's your job as part of this phase of your project to let us know:

• What changes need to be made to the default forms
• Whether any forms should be removed
• If new forms need to be added
• Are there any conditions that would cause additional or different forms to show (which your Implementation Manager will build in to your Onboarding Form Flow)

Here's a list of our default forms:

• Your Offer - This is the first form your new employee will see.  As a default it shows the Offer letter and gives the employee the ability to Accept, Query or Reject their offer.  Depending on which option they select, Eploy will assign the Hire the status of Acceptance Pending, Offer & Contract Query or Offer & Contract Rejected, respectively.
• Welcome to the Team - Having accepted the offer, this is the next page they'll see.  This is your opportunity to provide more information about your company and, if you like, include a welcome video.  In your demo system we've included one of our own videos, just to show you what it would look like.
• New Starter Details - As a default, on this page we're gathering the new employee's National Insurance Number, Date of Birth, Equal Opportunities data and Next of Kin details.  We also include the option for the Employee to let you know if another one of your employees recommended that they apply for this job.  This is typically used if you pay a referral bonus.
• Company Policies - Here you'll be able to provide useful documents for your new employees to download and read.  Typically these documents will be things like a Company Handbook and any relevant Policies they need to be aware of.  
• P45 and HMRC Starter Checklist - On this page your new employee will be able to upload a copy of their P45, if they have one, or answer standard HMRC new starter questions.
• Your Documents - This page gives your new employee the ability to upload any documents you need such as Right to Work documentation or certificates.
• Bank Details - Your Payroll team will need bank account details so they can pay your new employee, so this is the page where this information is gathered.  Although not included as a default, you can also capture SWIFT and IBAN codes on this page.
• References - Depending on your process, you may need to gather referee information to be able to request a reference.  This tab of the specification document lists all of the default questions we ask, relating to referees.  You can also use this page to tell us how many references are required and whether any kind of date validation is required
• Reference Submission - this form is not shown to Candidates as part of onboarding.  Instead, this is the form the Candidate's Referee will be asked to complete.  Again, you'll see our default set of questions.  Please take this opportunity to make sure you're asking the right kind of referencing questions.  As a default, the same form will be sent to all referees, but you can have multiple reference questionnaires focusing on the type of reference being provided e.g. Employment, Academic or Personal.
• Offer and Contract Acceptance - This is the final page of onboarding.  On this page your employee will formally accept the offer and sign their contract.  Having signed the contract the Hire Status is changed to Offer & Contract Accepted.
• Onboarding Complete - This page is used to thank your newly onboarded Employee for providing their information.  This page also contains their accepted Offer Letter, signed Contract and a reminder of the referee details they have provided, which they can update if necessary.  

Key things to consider and start gathering together

As you've seen above, there are several Onboarding forms included within your system, so at this stage you'll need to think about:

• What changes do you want to make to these pages?
• Do you want to include any additional pages?
• Are there any Conditions that will drive behaviour, either within a single form (show/hides) or routing a new employee down a different route to another employee using an Onboarding Form Flow?

These are your basic considerations, but here are a few other things you might want to think about and, if you don't already have them, start pulling together:

• Contractors - We've already briefly discussed varying your onboarding for Internal and External Candidates, but you might also want to consider Contractors, if you use them.  You have the freedom to create an "Onboarding" process for them as well.  Granted, you won't be necessarily gathering any data from them, merely getting them to agree to Ts&Cs, but you can use Onboarding for this purposes
• Regional Variations - If you're recruiting within the various regions of the UK, or Internationally, are there any regional or national variations that you need to take in to account?  E.g. Community Background questions in Northern Ireland or Bank Account differences Internationally.  Although you'll no doubt already be aware of these different requirements, the key thing to consider here is whether it's appropriate to ask these questions of all new employees, or if you can add some conditions in to your Onboarding process which only shows these different questions in the relevant circumstances.
• Multi-Stage Onboarding - A lot of our Customers need to use a 2-stage onboarding process, allowing time between offer acceptance and contract signing to conduct relevant background checks and referencing.  This can easily be achieved using our Onboarding Form Flow.  But, the question here is whether 2-stage onboarding is necessary in all circumstances?  If not, there's nothing stopping you from having both a single and 2-stage onboarding process running side-by-side, with only those new employees who need to go through a 2-stage process following that route.  If you were to go down this route, you'll need to consider what the trigger will be which takes the Candidate down the single or double-staged onboarding process.  This could be a question on the Vacancy or Offer, or even as simple as a different Hire Status.
• Media - As you've seen above, one of our default onboarding pages contains space for a video, wouldn't this be a great place to pop a welcome video from the CEO?  If not a video, how about a static image with some text?  While we're talking about it, if it's relevant to you, there's nothing stopping you using videos and other imagery throughout the onboarding process.  If you already have these videos or images, great.  If not, you'll need to start thinking about getting them produced sooner rather than later.  Something basic can usually be turned around in a couple of days, but something more professional can take many weeks to produce, especially when involving different teams of people.  Ideally you'll want to have any Media you want to use ready to drop in to your Onboarding forms just before your system goes live.
• Documents - Again, as mentioned above, you can include documents for your new employees to download and agree to as part of your Onboarding pages.  As with images and videos, if you have these documents already, brilliant.  But, are they up-to-date?  If any of the documents are due a review, it makes sense to get that review done now, so that when your system goes live you have the very latest versions of these documents available to download.  If the documents need to be written, again, we'd recommend getting this done sooner rather than later - we know from experience just how long it can sometimes take to get new policies and handbooks signed off internally.  Again, as with Media, you'll ideally want these documents ready to upload in to your system just before it goes live.
• Hire Statuses - The final thing to consider are your Hire Statuses.  These effectively serve three purposes: they allow you to define an Authorisation process for your Hires; you can use them to trigger automated email and sms notifications to your new employees; and they are used to to create a reportable Audit trail, track the hire through the onboarding stages and can be used by your HR/Onboarding teams to track whether individual tasks have been completed.  As with everything, you'll have a set of default statuses already available within your system and we'll automatically add extra statuses in if you tell us that you'll be using a multi-stage onboarding process, but have a think about any other Hire Statuses that you'd like to use.  for example, will you be carrying out off-line activities and could do with a way of tracking whether they have been completed?  You could use a Hire Status for that.

This isn't an exhaustive list.  Depending on the complexity of your system, there may be other things you need to consider, especially if you're having an Integration.  This list just highlights the most common considerations that we see as we implement systems.  You'll also want to bear in mind some of the considerations listed within the Application Form article, specifically around Paging, Conditions  and Reportability.  As with everything, your Implementation Manager will be able to help answer any questions you have about any of the points above.  

Completing the Specification Document

The Onboarding Specification Document and can be accessed from within your Project Files in Teamwork.

After the initial brief tab, you'll find an Onboarding Specification tab.  On this tab you'll find a list of all the default pages listed above.  You can use this page to let us know if you'd like them included as part of your onboarding and which Candidates should see the form.  If there are certain forms which should only be visible to certain candidates, let us know in the Which Candidates Should See This? field.

After this tab, you'll find the default onboarding pages themselves.  Within each form, simply let us know if any of the content needs to be changed, or if new content needs to be added.  

The amount of customisation we'll do to existing pages, and the need for additional Onboarding pages, will have been discussed as part of your Scope. 

If you do need to add extra pages, there is a Template tab at the end which you can use to capture the details for each additional page - simply duplicate and rename the tab as many times as you need (and which we have agreed to as part of your Scope).  If you realise, later on, that the number of pages you need exceeds the number agreed to as part of your scope, please have a chat with your Implementation Manager about it - we're a pragmatic bunch and appreciate that plans and requirements can change.  This is what our Change Control process was designed to help with.