Spotlight for Recruiting Professionals
June 6, 2012 

When developing the curriculum for your organization’s onboarding program, there are three components—technical skills, cultural assimilation, and social assimilation—that you should be sure to include:

• Technical Skills—To succeed on the job, your new graduate hires need to learn or enhance the skills that are specific to their position. Rather than assigning various training modules that tend to bore new hires eager to get involved in their work, an immersive and “hands-on” approach works best. Allow them to contribute to the organization and challenge them by giving them an assignment that will build their skills at an appropriate pace and incorporate them as part of a team, perhaps by working on a large and long-term project.
• Cultural Assimilation—Provide training that addresses your organization’s core values and social norms so new hires don’t have to learn them by making mistakes. Make sure to cover the basics—such as what time to arrive each day and proper attire—but also zoom out to cover larger topics such as what respect looks like in your office. While many new graduates you hire have experience in the workplace, that experience is limited to short stints, such as during summer internships, so they will need a deeper understanding of your organization’s values and expectations. It’s your responsibility to give an honest assessment of the organization’s culture. Make sure you note what the culture is and not what it aspires to be so you can deepen trust among your new hires and encourage them to be catalysts for positive change.
• Social Assimilation—Social relationships are essential to creating deep connections between your organization and its new graduate hires. Scheduling regular networking events is a good way to facilitate these relationships. Examples include in-office mentoring with high-level team members or a lunch with new employees and their teams. Or get creative by giving new hires a week’s worth of gift certificates to local restaurants so they can take a different colleague out to lunch each day.  

For more information about effective onboarding, see “All Aboard! Take Your Onboarding Program From Lackluster to Blockbuster” from the April 2012 NACE Journal.