An Automated Onboarding Process is Critical for a Successful Employee Experience. Take it From Me.

Employee Onboarding


By Sharvaani, Content Marketing Manager

It’s the first day at your new job. You have nervous energy flowing through your veins. You are excited to meet new people, and you are excited to get to work and be part of a new team. At the same time, your employer is just as excited to have you onboard. They feel the excitement of filling a critical position, and are likely thrilled to have a new team member ready to contribute to short-term and long-term challenges. Neither you nor your new organization want to make this experience anything less than amazing.

Sound familiar? We have all been through it. The energy and excitement, from both ends, represents a singular opportunity to start the employment experience and the employee onboarding process on a highly positive note, so that not only are new employees productive faster, they also have high morale and high energy through the entire course of their employment.

As a new employee here, at Jitterbit, I can personally relate. On day one, two months ago, when I first switched on my new computer, I was immediately excited to see what would happen next. What is the employee onboarding experience at Jitterbit going to be like? I was excited to complete the onboarding process steps:

  • Meet my new manager. What would his expectations be for my first months at the company? What type of personality would he have? What type of communicator would he be?
  • Meet my colleagues. Who would I be working with for the foreseeable future? What type of personalities do they have? Are there one or two individuals in particular I would be close with?
  • Receive critical assets and system access. I already had my laptop, but what other assets would I need to be successful? How would I receive my keys to the local office? Would I be provided timely access to our corporate messaging, email, and file directories necessary to do my job?
  • Enroll for benefits. As a full-time employee, I qualify for certain benefits. Medical, dental, and other considerations are an important part of my job, and its effect on my personal life.
  • Ensure timely and accurate compensation. As a content marketing manager, it is important to ensure the proper management of any employment-related expenses that I may have.

Fortunately, my onboarding process flow was seamless and timely, thanks to Human Resources’ (HR) efficient work ethic and experience. Given the usual challenges with employee onboarding, I consider myself lucky. Onboarding or offboarding of an employee is a combination of many different overlapping processes. The new employee onboarding checklist, includes setting up new employees in Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS), expense management systems, payroll management systems, and benefits administration systems.

For every new employee joining or leaving an organization, many HR departments who lack the ability to integrate data together must perform the same processes over and over, manually — which simply increases room for error and can cause employee dissatisfaction and higher attrition.

Challenges with Manual Onboarding Processes

  1. Never-ending paperwork: Many organizations rely on a new employee onboarding process that includes a paper-based approach for new hires questionnaires, whereby documents are emailed to the new hire, filled out, and then faxed or emailed back to the organization. Unfortunately, the HR department is required to manually enter all new hire details into the HRIS. To agree, such an onboarding system is cumbersome to say the least. However, productivity, speed and accuracy can take a major hit when this data must be entered in more than one system.
  2. Inter-departmental inconsistencies: Onboarding or offboarding may be coordinated centrally by the HR department, but also involve many other departments, such as IT support, security, operations, facilities, finance, and sometimes other business units. This puts pressure on the HR managers to act as project managers, coordinating, for example, the procurement of functional computers synced with the office WiFi, an ID card and other assets should all be ready by the first day of the new hire. Any sort of miscommunication between departments can delay the onboarding process and reduce an employee’s morale, as they are left wondering why the organization was not ready for them on day one. The need of the hour then is onboarding automation.

Benefits of Onboarding Process Automation

To deliver a flawless onboarding experience, organizations must move towards the automation of key HR systems. Unfortunately, most HR data is stored in multiple systems of record. For example, when candidate data is not properly connected to payroll, expense, and asset management systems during the onboarding process, it can damage productivity and hurt morale.

As a result, many HR managers are turning to low-code development platforms to speed up the interchange of information between discrete employee onboarding systems, using automated onboarding processes to remove much of the hard, manual labor that’s been the bane of many human resource divisions.

How a Dental Company Automated Employee Onboarding for its Massive Workforce

Ultradent, a global dental supply and manufacturing company, is one organization that appreciated this need for employee automation, and decided to do something about it. Its clients are dentists, group practices, government agencies and universities that employ over 1,400 people in 7 global locations. Before addressing their HR-related data management processes, Ultradent had several challenges. These included:

  1. Delayed time to productivity. With a massive global workforce, Ultradent was in need of a solution that could solve the issue of time consuming onboarding process steps, multiple departments, systems, and human dependencies on HR personnel. HR managers were becoming the human bottleneck for data processing, creating unnecessary delays, security vulnerabilities and audit compliance issues.
  2. Lack of integration technology. Ultradent’s existing onboarding technology stack was rendering itself heavily reliant on redundant human processes, with a significant room for error. Data entered manually was confined to a few onboarding tools, barring access to key systems, thereby slowing down the onboarding process as well as delaying the “time to productivity” of employees.
  3. Significant licensing costs: High licensing costs due to delays in off-boarding processes of customers lead to high employee dissatisfaction and poor perception of the company among employees. HR managers were struggling to provide the much desired impeccable employee experience.

Here’s how Ultradent used Jitterbit for Onboarding Automation

Ultradent embraced Jitterbit’s Employee Experience API360 (EX360) solution. It was thereby able to streamline its onboarding workflow, that included integrating the following processes:

  1. Recruiting candidates
  2. Finalizing hiring decisions
  3. Provisioning and deprovisioning assets
  4. Providing enrollment benefits
  5. Extending payroll commissions
  6. Creating employee incident dashboards
  7. Creating training certificates
  8. Managing their travel and other expenses
  9. Scenario planning
  10. Offboarding and termination

“We were looking to create a seamless onboarding experience and move away from a time-consuming process that included multiple departments, systems and personnel dependencies,” said Jason Namoc, integration engineer at Ultradent. “We have always been on the leading edge of technology, and that’s why we engaged with Jitterbit. The result is a seamless experience that expedited employee time-to-productivity and increased employee satisfaction.”, he added.

All of these otherwise cumbersome onboarding process steps were integrated with Jitterbit’s EX360 solution. New employee data was collected at a single point of creation, which was accessible by all key systems, leading to auto-provisioning of assets across all applications.

Consequently, there was less dependence on humans (thus the room for human error reduced), thereby eliminating security vulnerabilities and compliance issues. Overall, time to productivity was reduced, making employees happier and more satisfied.

Employee Experience API 360

Automate Your Onboarding Process with Jitterbit

As a 5x leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service, Jitterbit has the technical capability to join complex systems ranging from HRM, expense management, benefits management and more, with specialized employee reward or wellness applications running on-premises or in the cloud.

Jitterbit helps organizations automate and integrate applications, employee onboarding tools, data silos, and distributed systems. The latest offering from the company, Employee Experience API360, explores many of the issues faced by organizations that seek to create applications with a practical business focus from amongst their existing point products.

Jitterbit’s templates, for example, offer single, pre-built integrations that quickly move data in one direction between similar objects across two applications or systems. When it comes to onboarding and offboarding management within HR, Jitterbit’s templates include:

  • Workday <<>> ServiceNow Employee Onboarding Offboarding. This new employee onboarding template is designed for users of both Workday and ServiceNow. It is a pre-packaged solution for integrating Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) to ServiceNow ITSM. The Workday to ServiceNow Process Template provides a unified experience for employee onboarding processes to activate the worker, including IT, facilities and security requests to issue the employee laptop, badge, desk space, etc. 
  • Workday <<>> Salesforce Employee Onboarding Offboarding. This template is designed for users of both Workday and Salesforce. It is a pre-packaged solution for integrating Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) to Salesforce Sales Cloud. The Workday to Salesforce Process Template provides a unified experience for common employee onboarding and off-boarding processes. 
  • Workday <<>> Oracle NetSuite Employee Onboarding Offboarding. This template is a pre-packaged solution for integrating Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) to NetSuite ERP. The Workday to NetSuite Process Template provides a unified experience for common employee onboarding and off-boarding processes. 

With a powerful and easy-to-use cloud API integration platform, Jitterbit enables HR managers and other stakeholders to connect to any on-premises or in-cloud application allowing them to drive ROI, increase customer satisfaction and optimize service delivery and management, giving them an edge in an extremely competitive market.

For more information and to see examples of the various use cases in action, watch this webinar on how to build a best-in-class connected enterprise.