Process Automation Success Story: Onboarding Tool
You can imagine, as a consulting firm, Prime 8 hires a *lot* of people. It’s our business to get an expert hired and placed on assignment with our client as fast as possible. So having a streamlined and efficient approach to onboarding is essential.
Implementing a low-code Power Automate onboarding solution allowed us to provide a better experience for our new hires as well as each member of the back office team involved in getting new hires started in their roles. Here’s a closer look at our learnings and how using technology to improve operations and experiences (for Prime 8 and the clients we serve).
Onboarding Challenges: Time, Complexity, and a Lack of Transparency
As a rapidly growing consulting firm, onboarding new employees at Prime 8 is all in a day’s work. The goal of having consultants assigned within 3 to 5 days of a client request became more challenging with explosive pandemic growth.
This growth led Prime 8 to examine back office systems looking for ways to gain efficiencies that would allow for smooth scalability. In reviewing employee onboarding, Prime 8 found an overly complex, completely manual system that involved a lot of interdependent stakeholders. Tracking a new hire through the process and communicating their status was a critical need but extraordinarily time consuming. A more efficient approach would allow more new hires to move through onboarding at the same time and allow the Prime 8 team to connect consultants with assignments faster.
“Organic growth in the company over time led to an onboarding process that had evolved to accommodate just-in-time needs. It was more a cobbled together system with unintentional gaps than a well-planned approach built to meet the demands of our current business. We knew we wanted a more intuitive approach that optimized our use of technology to scale,” shares Scott Weeden, Lead Consultant on our onboarding tool development project. “In the old system, it was too easy for one of the manual steps to get missed - by both our internal folks and our new hires. Important things would fall through the cracks and get forgotten.”
A lack of transparency in the onboarding completion process also revealed a need for improvement. “Because many different stakeholders were involved in onboarding, each responsible for different steps, an employee’s manager had no view into where the new hire was in the onboarding process, which impacted our ability to set start date expectations with our clients. We needed a way to share accurate status without interrupting 15 different people,” says Scott.
With these requirements in mind, Scott and his team set out to build a Power Automate solution. Having done this type of work for clients, Prime 8 knew that technology could achieve the efficiency and visibility we needed. The ideal tool would add transparency to onboarding, reduce complexity for all parties involved, streamline to save time, and include a way to ensure steps weren’t missed.
The Prime 8 Approach
Prime 8 chose to automate our onboarding with Power Automate because of its compatibility with our existing data structure. Other platforms constrain data formats and structures where Power Automate accommodates a variety of data sources - flexibility that allows us to use our data sources in the format they are in, saving us valuable development time.
The Outcome: Faster Onboarding with More Transparency and Scalability
“With our former manual processes, we were limited as to how many employees we could onboard at any given time. It was a high-touch process that involved constant follow-up and management. The automated solution manages and provides tracking on an infinite number of candidates simultaneously, providing a level of scalability that aligns with the growth in our business,” notes Scott.
Here’s what the new automated onboarding workflow looks like:
A recruiter fills out a Microsoft Forms form in Teams with the new hire’s details.
The completion of this form triggers the creation of all of the respective onboarding documents for the new hire. Sharepoint is the central repository for all new hire documents regardless of where the person is in the onboarding process.
Once the documents are created, they must receive dual approval. Recruiting and HR both receive a Microsoft Approvals message via Teams and email to review the documents for accuracy and provide approval.
Once approvals are complete, the offer related documents are sent to the new hire who provides signatures in Docusign.
The Docusign signature triggers PowerAutomate to assign a set of tasks to different departments and trigger notification via Teams and email:
HR receives notifications to beggin onboarding tasks for the new hire.
The new hire’s manager has departmental and client onboarding tasks assigned once the HR work is complete.
If tasks are not complete in a timely manner, PowerAutomate sends reminders.
PowerAutomate tracks progress, step by step, for each new hire and populates a Power BI dashboard accessible to all Prime 8 stakeholders.
Using PowerAutomate to assign and track onboarding tasks allows the Prime 8 team to easily see where the roadblocks are so managers can follow up in a timely way. If a candidate has had an offer letter for three days, HR can nudge the candidate. If a background check is still pending, we can follow up with our providers to see what’s holding it up. Managers know where their candidates are each step of the way and can anticipate when they will begin work for our clients.
Prime 8 is now able to onboard more people, faster, track new hires end-to-end with transparency across the team, while getting consultants in place faster and easier with our clients. It’s a scalable technology enabled system that will grow with our company without any additional work.
Learn about the solution Prime 8 developed to streamline end to end onboarding at Seattle Suntan in 6 weeks and reach out if you’d like to explore using PowerAutomate streamline your own onboarding.
Want to experience our candidate onboarding process first-hand? See our open consulting positions!
