The ability to scale your company will be largely dependant on your ability to recruit, retain, and properly deploy new employees. While certainly important, recruiting is not the end-game, but rather it is the very first step in the talent management lifecycle. Over the years I have watched great recruiting efforts fall prey to a sudden death when everything that management communicated to the new hire during the interview process was completely unwound by the reality of what they experienced on their first day on the job.

These days there seems to be a buzz-word for just about everything in business. This article will focus on the topic of employee onboarding which is a combination of employee orientation, integration and socialization. Onboarding is part compliance, part training, part PR, part branding and part cultural socialization. A new hire can finish his/her first day on the job with feeling exhausted, frustrated and second guessing their decision to come to work for your company or they can go home feeling energized, motivated, valued and lucky to be part of such a great company. Never will your employees be more motivated and impressionable than on their first day of work. You can recognize this as an opportunity and exploit the dynamic for the mutual benefit of all concerned parties or you can waste the opportunityThe choice is yours.

The guidelines listed below will help you create an employee onboarding system that will add value to your recruiting efforts:

Develop a new hire punchlist that coordinates efforts between HR, Admin, IT, MarComm, Legal and Accounting departments so that nobody is caught off guard or is unprepared for the arrival of a new employee. This simple step will allow for enough lead time to coordinate the logistics of securing work space, provisioning computers, phones, business cards and office supplies, for the configuration of security access and permissions, the preparation of press releases, preparation of training, to allow for payroll and benefits to be set-up etc.

Assign all new employees a mentor and make sure that the mentor is not on vacation or under deadline during the new employees first few weeks on the job. The mentor should send out an introductory e-mail to all employees in advance of the new hires start date providing a brief background on the employee as well as an overview of the position they were hired for.

Plan out and/or script as far into the future as possible for all new hires. At a minimum their first week should be scripted and preferably their first 90 days. The schedule should include orientation, training, shadowing more tenured employees, regular interaction with their mentor, etc.

Nothing dampens the spirit of a new employee faster than having them show up for the fist day of work only to sit in the lobby for an hour while the administrative staff attempts to figure out who they are and where theyre supposed to be. Remember deployment begins on day one and the first day on the job will set the stage for how the new employee feels about the company and their position within the organization.