In today’s job market, the competition for talent is ferocious. Qualified candidates are better informed than ever, and the experience they get along the hiring process is often the deciding factor between competing job offers.  

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Engaging your new employees from the time they accept their offer is critical to driving engagement and reducing attrition. A 2014 Gartner study found that nearly one third of participants had quit a job within the first six months due to unclear guidelines, ineffective training, or an unfriendly environment.

One of the most effective ways to prevent these employee false starts is to put a structured, measured onboarding plan in place for your team or company.
 
It’s not just paperwork

We hear this all the time: "We already have a process in place to collect all the required forms and paperwork for new employees." Legal, administrative and HR-related tasks are a necessary, but are a relatively small part of onboarding.

Streamlining the paperwork process won't move the needle on a new hire's experience. What will move the needle is what happens over the next few weeks or months as your new employee integrates into your company culture, makes connections, and starts feeling productive.
 
Don't wait until your employee's first day to start onboarding
 
Onboarding should start once your new employee has a start date. This often referred to as pre-onboarding or "pre-boarding". This is your chance to keep new hires excited about their choice to join your company, foster relationships, and demonstrate your company's culture and values.
 
One of the most important pre-onboarding activities is preparing new hires for their first day of work. This can be a stressful time for them.

Reduce the stress by creating a checklist and agenda for their first day:

• Remind new hires to bring their photo ID and bank information
• Specify the dress code if your company has one
• Provide directions to your office
• Give the name of a contact person, or hiring buddy
• Share company handbooks or policies that they should read

Extra credit:

• Send company swag, such a t-shirt or mug

• Include video messages from the team welcoming them to the company
• Include a personalized welcome from the CEO or another executive

 
Dynamics 365 for Talent makes it easy to engage new employees before their start date by allowing you to create a welcome guide using their personal email address. You can even hide certain activities until your new employee has an official work email address.

Make the first day special
 
An employee's first day should reinforce their decision that joining your company was a good idea!

• Make sure that new hires have everything they need to get started. This includes a workspace, computer, and required credentials, software, and tools.

• Create an agenda for the first day
• Don't just focus on orientation. Make sure to have fun, introduce them to people, and show them around the office.
• Keep other employees in the loop by letting them know that someone new is joining the company. Don't leave out the people in IT, Payroll, and other administrative departments.

 
Focus on relationships
 
Relationships are key to getting new hires get up to speed. More importantly, they help create a sense of community and belonging at your company.

• Identify an expert or champion in your company and make them an onboarding buddy
• Connect new hires with job-related communities or interest groups. This is a great way to find coaches or mentors.
• Share team member profiles (ideally, ahead of time) to speed up communication, knowledge sharing, and networking
• Share social communities or events that align to your employee's personal goals

Dynamics 365 for Talent allows you to create a list of key contacts, complete with name, contact information, and photo and share it with new hires ahead of time. It's great to show up on your first day and put faces to names.

Provide training

 
Give your new hire the confidence and tools they need to be successful. This starts with clearly defining their responsibilities and setting your expectations for how they will achieved. Next, create a training plan that focuses on the skills they need to meet your expectations. Don't just focus on compliance-based training.
 
Set clear milestones
 
Setup clear checkpoints and feedback loops between you and your new hire. Create as much opportunity to intervene and course-correct as possible. You want to address issues before they become big problem—or worse-attrition.

• Schedule a 1:1 before their first week is over. This is a great time to discuss expectations, work styles, and career growth.

• Define 30, 60, and 90 day goals for new hires. Be sure to check in regularly to see how they are tracking against these goals.

Create these milestones in your employee's welcome guide by clicking the "New Section" button in Dynamics 365 for Talent.

 
Sources
Hanscome, R., & Lougee, M. (2016). Improving Organizational Performance by Evolving From 'Onboarding Employees' to 'Managing Worker Transitions' [Abstract]. Gartner.
Onboarding in a Box. LinkedIn Talent Solutions

The post Kick start employee onboarding with Dynamics 365 for Talent appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re excited to announce that Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Talent is generally available. See how Microsoft can accelerate your organization’s human resource (HR) digital transformation.

Dynamics 365 for Talent is here to bring out the best in your people and create high-impact, sustainable results with exceptional employee and candidate experiences across the talent journey.

Win the war for talent by keeping candidates engaged

In today’s job market, the competition for talent is fierce. Qualified candidates are more informed than ever, and their hiring experience is often the deciding factor between competing job offers. You need a hiring process that will attract and engage the right candidates and ensure that you are their first choice once you make an offer. Accelerate your candidate pipeline, shorten the time to fill roles, and land top-tier candidates.

Candidate LinkedIn profiles are automatically integrated throughout the Dynamics 365 for Talent experiences.

Eliminated the back-and-forth of emails when trying to coordinate interview times between candidates and interviewers. Dynamics 365 for Talent automatically integrates with Office 365 to find the best times for everyone.

Candidates are automatically kept in the loop throughout their hiring experience. They can track their application status, indicate their availability, and see the details of their interview so they feel prepared.

Ignite employee success

Newly hired employees want to get up to speed and make an impact quickly. Getting them started off on the right foot is key to long term success.

With Dynamics 365 for Talent, managers can create step-by-step, personalized onboarding guides that help new employees feel welcome and keep them engaged, even before their first day.

• Help employees ramp up quickly with prioritized checklists, helpful resources, and key contacts
• Create connections for new hires by assigning an onboarding buddy and contacts
• Save time and drive consistency by creating onboarding templates by job function or employee type

Go beyond retention—drive talent success

Companies must foster diversity, equality, development, and inclusion to drive impact. A responsive digital workplace lets HR leaders create cohesive recruiting and hiring strategies, and robust onboarding programs. Employee engagement is strongly connected to productivity, profitability, and customer experience. If employees know their work directly influences the success of the company, they feel more engaged. HR leaders can encourage engagement by cultivating success and empowering employees to take charge of their own career paths.

Elevate to strategic HR

A true HR leader envisions an unforgettable talent experience, aligned with organizational business objectives to deliver high-impact, sustainable results. Transforming your HR approach paves the way for pivotal, enterprise-wide change, offering an opportunity to truly build an employee base that mirrors the entrepreneurial vision at the company’s core.

HR transformation starts by empowering managers and employees with more self-service options. This improve business impact and drives an agile, high-performance culture by automating routine HR tasks so that you can focus on more strategic initiatives.

Create centralized employee profiles that highlight skills and experiences—using Microsoft Office 365 and LinkedIn data

Get visibility across your global organization and minimize compliance risk

Improve planning with cost-effective programs that can be tracked and analyzed

Start your digital transformation today!

Put people at the center of the talent lifecycle to create engaged, productive teams that help usher in growth and success. Dynamics 365 for Talent can be deployed as an end-to-end solution, or as modular talent experience applications powered by your systems of record.  You choose where to start and the solution will grow with you as your company evolves.

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Talent is now GA! appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Talent takes a holistic approach to attracting, onboarding, and growing your talent.

We announced our new human capital management solution as a new way to drive your business forward in today’s digital landscape in Scott Guthrie’s blog and showcased it at Microsoft Business Forward event in May. Today we are excited to announce that Dynamics 365 for Talent– a collection of cloud services empowering more connected, engaging and intelligent talent experiences – is now available for technical preview.

Connect the dots between the talent you have, the people you need to meet strategic goals, and top candidates in the market to ensure you always have the best person for the job.

Reimagine your hiring experience

Delivering customer success and outcomes begins with empowered, skilled and engaged employees. Today’s job market is highly competitive and talent shortages exist in virtually every industry. Organizations must compete for the best candidates, and making a competitive offer is no longer enough to land top talent. Candidates want to understand the company culture, vision and mission. And most importantly, they are assessing if your company is the right fit for them. You can no longer land world-class talent without providing a streamlined and compelling hiring experience. Dynamics 365 for Talent empowers organizations of all sizes to connect digitally and professionally with candidates from first contact to offer acceptance and throughout their employee journey.

Chemonics is very excited about Dynamics 365 Talent. It begins to take full advantage of integration with LinkedIn, and is startlingly easy to use. We were able to deploy it within 21 days, and our teams were able benefit immediately. It closes a key gap in the Dynamics 365 ecosystem and will help us empower our employees around the world to be better informed, more connected, and more productive.

-Eric Reading, Executive Vice President, Chemonics International Inc.

Our solution helps organizations shape the candidate impression, simplify the interview scheduling, and increase transparency between the candidate, recruiters and the hiring team.

Often the biggest challenge in the hiring process is coordinating schedules and conducting impactful interviews. Scheduling candidates for interviews – whatever interview style you follow – is cumbersome, and more challenging as schedules change in real time. Dynamics 365 for Talent is integrated with Office 365 to enable hiring managers to quickly set up the right interview team and interact with both the candidate and hiring team’s availability. In addition, integration with Skype provides a more efficient and cost-effective way to conduct interviews with candidates in any location. Mobile experiences ensure that interviewers can rapidly share feedback to shorten the time to fill roles.

Keep candidates engaged

Showcasing your corporate culture and creating a good first impression is key to attracting the right candidates. Today, you must provide a transparent and compelling experience to keep candidates engaged and excited throughout the hiring process. A candidate’s recruiting experience is often a major factor when deciding to accept an offer and join a company. With Dynamics 365 for Talent candidates stay in the loop with a personalized guide that shows their application status, allows submission of interview availability, and provides transparency across the entire hiring process. Candidates now have one reliable place to track their job application.

Set employees up for success

Many new hires show up to work their first day excited and ready to make an impact. Only to find that nothing is ready for them. They quickly become disengaged as the don’t have the right tools, information and connections to hit the ground running. Dynamics 365 for Talent helps you create step-by-step onboarding guides for new employees that help them feel welcome and keep them engaged, even before their first day. Let new employees know what to expect on their first day by giving them clear activities to tackle, and providing contacts or any other resources they may need.

“It was really well thought out, it made me feel like [my manager] put some time into [my onboarding].”

-Emily, Microsoft PowerApps intern

Give employees a plan for their first few weeks to help them get up to speed and become impactful quickly. Create connections for your new employee by sharing who is on their team, and key contacts (such as a mentor), that will help them navigate their new job. With Dynamics 365 for Talent you can easily provide personalized onboarding that sets new hires up for success, while saving time and driving consistency with onboarding templates for different job functions or employee types.

Empower Employees and Managers

Microsoft has reimagined traditional human resource experiences to put people at the center of digital transformation. Strategic HR is dependent upon your team having the time to focus on new initiatives and programs that align to business goals. Empower your employees to take full control of their administrative tasks, like requesting vacation and manage their direct deposit. Managers have a single place to gather insight and take actions for their team. Everything from compensation, competency and leave can be managed for a team in a single place while gaining insights from embedded Power BI reports. Your people get the tools they need to succeed, and you get the people analytics required to simplify processes, facilitate agility and optimize HR programs.

From transactional to strategic HR

When managers and employees take an active role in HR administration, your HR team can focus on building a culture of empowerment and driving strategic change. All human resource workloads are more easily managed from a centralized location, through optimized experiences. Through the creation of comprehensive workflow checklists, HR can now execute on their strategic plans and optimize HR processes in a way that keeps everyone in the know and on task. Now HR can focus on programs that align to strategic business goals such as culture building, competitive benefits and compensation packages and leadership development.

One Solution—Integrated and Extensible

Dynamics 365 for Talent helps you attract, empower and optimize your people, along with key integrations to Office 365, best of breed service providers, Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, and LinkedIn. Dynamics 365 for Talent leverages the common data services platform with built-in extension points for Microsoft Flow, Power BI, and Power Apps.

Key integrations to support the overall business:*

• LinkedIn
• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise Edition
• Background screening
• Global payroll providers
• ATS providers

*available at or shortly after general availability

Dynamics 365 for Talent is available for preview now.

The post Dynamics 365 for Talent Technical Preview Is Here! appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.