Create an Effective Recruiter Onboarding Plan That Makes Your Employees Stay for Years

If any role requires a rock-solid onboarding plan, it's the one for recruiters. The onboarding experience is at the heart of their future working tasks. 

Offer a bad one, and you're basically telling them that the hard work they'll put into scouting top talent will be wasted. 

This article will give you all the steps you need to create a recruiter onboarding plan that rocks. Your new recruiters will be part of the talent acquisition process in no time!

✈️ Why is onboarding important for recruiters?

With the increasing competition on the market today, you can't afford a bad onboarding experience. 

Note the word "experience" – you need to take the onboarding beyond a process and into people. 

Onboarding experience is the new generation's onboarding, ensuring that your new hires feel welcome and able to show their full potential. 

An essential difference from the old-school way is that the focus of the process has shifted from paperwork to people. 

So, HR staff and coworkers contribute to onboarding a new employee. 

And you need to know how to create an onboarding plan for recruiters since they will be responsible for a critical phase of talent management. 

Great onboarding will help your recruiters replicate the process and provide stellar onboarding experiences to other recruits. 

Your recruiters will play a key role in making your new hires will feel a sense of community, role clarity, and excitement from day one.

📝 Recruiter onboarding 30-60-90-day plan template

Regardless of which role you're recruiting for, there are some best practices for training new employees. We recommend having a look at those before you start the recruitment process.

Similar to other roles, the onboarding of a recruiter starts well ahead of their first day at work (commonly called preboarding). 

You'll need to cover things such as:

• Sending out relevant documents and onboarding documentation.
• Making your new recruiter feel welcome and included. (Bonus points for sending company swag!)
• Ordering hardware. 
• Organizing access to all software.
• Notifying the team and booking intro meetings and training courses with team members.

Day 1

Main goal: Host a memorable reception. 

You only have one chance to make a first impression – so make it a good one! 

Day 1 should be less about their actual tasks as a recruiter and more about integration into the team. 

You could also include familiarization with overall company goals and values. 

Week 1

Life-cycle recruitment efforts

Cover life-cycle recruitment efforts. Explain the whole recruitment process, including steps like: 

• Research
• Advertising
• Sourcing
• Seeding
• Scheduling
• Interviewing
• Candidate assessment
• Closing and negotiating 
• Onboarding
• Additional follow-up after hire

Consider having different professionals explain different parts of the process. 

Candidate pipeline

• Go through the structure of your candidate database and applicant files for future reference. 
• Explain how you source potential candidates locally and online to build a comprehensive pipeline that will ultimately reduce recruitment time. 

Feedback

• Have a one-to-one meeting with your new hire for a temperature check. Let your new employee give feedback on the training and onboarding so far.

First 30 days

Ads

• Develop job ads for open positions in collaboration with management.
• Coordinate posting about available jobs across platforms and with other HR members.

Track KPIs related to cost and performance

• Track and analyze recruitment costs.
• Track goals, metrics, and performance of the hiring cycle.
• Communicate results to the team. 

Internal communication

• Introduction to routines around communication. 
• Start taking responsibility for ongoing communication with hiring managers and management regarding the status of open positions.
• Keep records of candidate interviews and report them to Hiring Managers.

Candidate communication

• Learn the details of the benefits and policies to educate candidates better and avoid mismatches.
• Learn about the details of every step in the hiring process – give necessary documents, job descriptions, screening tests, and interview questions to hiring managers.

Employee communication

• Communicate the status of the recruitment efforts to the employees and announce new hires.

Onboarding 

• Assist with onboarding new hires – both operationally and culturally. Nothing will make your new recruiter grow as quickly as onboarding your upcoming team members!

Networking

• Invite your new HR hire to networking events with relevant industry organizations or a happy hour (physical or virtual) to connect with their colleagues in a casual setting.

Feedback

• Collect feedback for the onboarding process so far.

Days 30-60

Screening of candidates

• Independently conduct screening of eligible candidates to decide which ones to proceed with.

Candidate communication

• Communicate requirements and duties to prospective candidates.
• Start scheduling and organizing interviews with suitable candidates. Start by assisting other HR members. Then start hosting their own interviews or leading them with other staff members who are subject matter experts.
• Be the first point of contact and responsible for answering any questions from the candidates.

Track KPIs related to cost/performance

• Analyze KPIs and employee onboarding metrics and ensure you meet recruitment objectives to maintain appropriate staffing levels.

Prepare and present reports

• Learn how to prepare and design a report following company standards.
• Present reports to stakeholders and upper management.
• Participate in discussions about the recruitment process and possible improvements based on the report's results.

Feedback

• Collect feedback for the onboarding process so far. Is your new recruiter facing any challenges? Are they missing any information or skills to be successful in their new roles?

👂 You can use our new hire onboarding survey template to collect valuable insights. 

Days 60-90

Develop recruitment methods, initiatives, and projects

• Revise existing methods and develop new, creative, and cost-effective recruiting strategies to attract and keep top talent.
• Help drive recruiting initiatives, including diversity & inclusion, university relations, talent communities, and institutional partners.
• Launch your projects to evolve the onboarding experience further—examples: competitor analysis, case studies, and insights from new hires from the last year. 

Feedback

• Collect feedback once more – this time for the entire onboarding process.
• You can also consider running a 360 feedback session. You can collect insights from peers, as well as encourage self-reflection.

➡️ Are you in need of extra templates? Say no more. Check out our free and essential onboarding templates. You can choose from multiple role-based checklists, communication samples, and an onboarding presentation template.

👀 What does an effective recruiter onboarding process look like?

Onboarding a recruiter is meta. It is similar to getting any employees onboard since you follow the four phases of onboarding: 

• preboarding; 
• new hire orientation; 
• role-specific training;
• easing the transition. 

But it is different in that the onboarding experience itself is something the new hire will be responsible for. 

You thus have a golden opportunity of teaching your new recruiter through direct experience. 

Tip: First-hand experience can often be more powerful than having new hires theoretically absorb information.

➡️ Don't forget about engaging your new hires. We share 11 ways to engage new employees starting from day one.

⏰ How long is the recruiter onboarding?

Ideally, the recruiter onboarding lasts for at least 90 days and up to a year. This idea holds for onboarding any role. 

The experience should include a continuously increasing amount of work/execution of tasks, accompanied by a decreasing amount of studies and theoretical learning. That said, learning is a never-ending process – it just shifts into less structured learning and more learning while doing, together with ongoing role development.

⚙️ Why you need to automate your recruiter onboarding process

You are burning your dollar bills if you don't automate your recruiter onboarding process. 

Automation comes with a low startup time investment – but after that, you have a solid system saving you time over and over.

An automated recruiter onboarding process helps boost productivity since there are no glitches.

With an automated experience, you can easily start onboarding before day one through preboarding.

💡 The best onboarding software solutions will offer ready-to-use automated workflows. 

➡️ Zavvy has multiple ready-to-use onboarding templates, which you can quickly (and freely) get a feel for.

Plus, you will create a better experience which – as we have stated – is extra important when onboarding a recruiter. 

➡️ But don't take our word for it. Check how our customers Alasco and Storyblok saved time and money (and repetitive work!) by automating their onboarding processes. 

👀 Alasco saw a remarkable +67% increase in employee growth within a year from starting with Zavvy!

➡️ Onboarding your People team on autopilot with Zavvy

While all onboarding plans are important, a solid recruiter onboarding plan may be the most essential of them all.

There are many steps to consider, and life gets easier when implementing a cutting-edge automated onboarding experience developed by learning scientists.

Zavvy has developed a unique preboarding software that lets you automate the preboarding – without losing the human touch. On the contrary – the software is designed to facilitate participation and engagement by managers and colleagues to the new hire—a centralized approach for a decentralized process.

The software will automatically notify everyone involved to ensure they remember meetings, celebrations, and training. 

As a result, you're guaranteed to offer your new hires the onboarding experience they deserve – one that feels like the 2020s rather than the 1980s.

Set up your new HR hires for success with Zavvy by creating a structured and exciting onboarding experience in a few clicks. 

Book a call to discover how our automated onboarding tool will take your onboarding to the next level.