Those Critical First Impressions – Recruitment and Onboarding
The recruitment process is the first opportunity that candidate and employer have to size each other up; to see if they are a good fit and to get a sense of how they will work together in the future. Yet many businesses struggle to provide that all-important good first impression during their recruitment activities. Long wait times, overly cumbersome interview processes, and lots of paperwork can leave potential candidates feeling lost, overwhelmed, or simply unwelcome. As a result, employers lose potentially great hires to other businesses often without understanding why.
For one U.S.-based non-profit, NLETS, the quest to deliver a better recruitment and onboarding process became the personal mission for new HR Manager, Suzanne Church.
NLETS Set the Standard in Law Enforcement Tech but Needed Help in Recruitment
Founded in the mid-1960s, NLETS was created to provide secure access to law enforcement information across the U.S. and its territories. Used by over 1 million law enforcement officers, NLETS provides rapid, secure access to public safety and criminal justice data, processing over 4 billion transactions in one year alone.
Like any organization, though, the recruitment and onboarding experience are essential to setting the right tone for the overall employee experience. However, NLETS was struggling with manual and paper-based systems that were out of date. For Suzanne Church, newly appointed HR Manager, the problem was very personal.
“I’d applied for a job with NLETS in June and didn’t get my first interview with them until September,” she explained. “It was too long.”
So when she took over as HR manager, she focused on recruiting first.
“HR was responsible for every step,” she said, “and it was very manual. Everything was on paper or in spreadsheets.”
Worse, the process was very convoluted, with too many interviews for even relatively lower-level jobs. HR conducted interviews long before the hiring manager got involved, which mean that, in Suzanne’s words, “HR’s pre-interviews were often a waste of time, and it could take 4-6 months to narrow down to a single candidate.”
Something had to change.
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