The ever-evolving topic of onboarding has seen a remarkable shift in perspectives. Automated onboarding programs have taken center stage, altering how we approach this crucial process. The pursuit of refining the focal points for effectively welcoming new team members persists, aiming to seamlessly assimilate them into their roles and the company culture. In this insightful episode, Kila Haynes Martinez, the Owner/President of KAHM Consulting, LLC, joins in conversation with Nolan Hout, Senior Vice President of Infopro Learning, to delve into the universe of onboarding.
Together, they explore every facet of the onboarding journey, starting from pre-joining strategies and extending to the pivotal first 90 days to ensure robust employee retention. Kila brings her deep enthusiasm for people, training, coaching, and development. She highlights the significance of tailoring the onboarding process according to available resources while underlining the importance of engaging employees before their official start date. Delving into remote and in-person onboarding approaches, she strongly emphasizes creating a positive initial impression.
Listen to the Podcast to learn more:
Question:
Can you start by telling us a little bit about your origin to get where you are today?
Expert profile:
Kila Haynes Martinez
Kila Haynes Martinez, the Owner of KAHM Consulting, LLC, is a seasoned professional specializing in the entire employee journey. With extensive leadership experience, she prioritizes effective onboarding, training, and development for long-term employee satisfaction. Kila is also skilled in emotional intelligence, adapting to different personality styles and fostering strong communication. Her Leadership Development and Talent Acquisition background showcases her expertise in mentoring teams, recruitment, training, and customer service. Holding a Master of Science in Management focused on Leadership Development from Cardinal Stritch University, Kila is a proven leader in her field.
Nolan Hout
Nolan Hout is the Senior Vice President at Infopro Learning. He has over a decade of experience in the L&D industry, helping global organizations unlock the potential of their workforce. Nolan is results-driven, investing most of his time in finding ways to identify and improve the performance of learning programs through the lens of return on investment. He is passionate about networking with people in the learning and training community. He is also an avid outdoorsman and fly fisherman, spending most of his free time on rivers across the Pacific Northwest.
An excerpt of the discussion follows:
Nolan:
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Learning and Development podcast sponsored by Infopro Learning.
As always, I am your host, Nolan Hout. Today, we will be talking about All Things Onboarding, and I can’t think of a better person to join us for this than Kila Martinez.
Kila has over 20 years of experience in the L&D field, consulting with companies on recruitment strategies, talent development, process improvement, content development, and anything else you would need in that space.
Today’s podcast will cover the onboarding journey, from what we can do before someone joins the organization to the 1st 90 days to ensure they stay with us. Enough with the intro; it’s time for the main event. Let’s meet Kila.
Hello, Kila. Welcome to the podcast.
Kila:
Hi, thank you. Thank you for having me.
Nolan:
Today, we’re going to talk all about onboarding and everything there is to know about onboarding. But before we do that, I always find what many of our listeners find almost the most fascinating part of the podcast is just learning a little bit more about your journey to where you are today.
Now, you own a very successful consulting business, and you’ve thrown up your shingles, but you were only sometimes doing that. Also, we have found that the path people take to get there, especially in this learning and development space, has many flows, ebbs, and turns.
Can you start by telling us a little bit about your origin to get where you are today?
Kila:
Yeah, absolutely. I started way back; I won’t age myself, but we’ll say way back when I started my journey in retail management and spent a lot of time in leadership there at the store level, then regional, district, and regional level leadership. That experience allowed me to delve into HR, particularly within training and development. In positions like those, you tend to take on a multifaceted role.
I got through school and ran operations for a small custom fence company. So, they make all kinds of different custom fences. But again, I was a little bit of everything. I did all the hiring, all the training, onboarding, and everything that went along with it. And then I had a couple of bumps in the road, some closures and locations and things like that. I, furthermore finished my master’s program. My master’s was in leadership development. I just was at a stance to, like, okay, Kila, what are you going to do with your life now? You need to figure out what you want to do with your life.
I had a friend who had been in a recruiting firm for many years, probably over 20. And he said while you’re figuring out your life, why don’t you come over here and hang out with us for a while? You can make some good money in the meantime. So, I did, and I built a good client base in the recruiting space and built some really strong relationships. One of my larger clients was a large global manufacturing company, and they stole me to be their talent and leadership development manager for all of their North.
They have seven US-based locations and did a tiny bit of work with Canada and Mexico, but mostly was in the US, the seven locations they had. I built their training from the ground up when I first came in. And this is compliance training, leadership training, safety, and everything you can think of. I ran the whole gamut, created and facilitated all the training, leadership, boot camps, project management training, etc. I was also in charge of all their recruiting for their seven US space locations.
I was pretty busy. I had a couple of minutes here and there to breathe, but I loved that. I love that fast pace. I have to keep moving; I have to be doing something ever-changing. So, I did that for about four and a half years and enjoyed it.
They paid for my CPTM certification, so I certified in Professional and Training Management, which was awesome; I learned a lot there, and the company was purchased in the landscape of what they needed or wanted to be changed quite a bit, and the full piece became almost solely talent acquisition.
So, running talent acquisition for all their locations is great. But my passion lies within people, training, coaching, and developing people. And they knew that. And you know, I have a very still to this day have a very good relationship with that Chief HR officer there.
He’s a wonderful human. And so, he said, I know this is different from what you want to do, but what the business needs and PS matters.
Everybody listening probably knows what the business needs matters, whether it’s really what you want to do or not, where your focus needs to shift. I did that for about a year for them. I shifted my focus solely to building a budget and a whole process around town acquisition, including a very robust onboarding program.
At one point, the firm I came from reached back out, and I still use them for recruiting. When running town acquisition, I used my old firm, which they stole me from, to help with recruiting needs. I still had a good relationship with them, and they said we needed somebody to come in and bring in our new recruiter.
So, hire and train all the recruiters that come into our organization and then do some training. Continue development training within and look for operational improvements, new technologies, and how we can continue to grow.
So exciting for me, I made the very difficult decision to move back to my Old Firm and take over that large chunk of what they needed. And then, no one wanted this, but the firm had some troubles and things like that. It came to a point where it was time for me to decide what I would do here.
I decided to take a leap of faith and go out on my own to maintain that good balance of talent on the people and recruiting sides. I’ve got a good balance, but I can’t be just a recruiter; not in me. I love people; I love coaching, developing and training people. So that’s what got me to where I am today. That was quite long-winded.
Nolan:
No, but lots of twists and turns; that was excellent. You touched on onboarding, which is the topic we’ll discuss today. So, it works out quite well.
Onboarding is one of these perennial things that, every year, we’re talking about changes to onboarding programs and automated onboarding programs, and mindsets have shifted lots and lots over the years of what they should be focused on and shouldn’t be.
When we look at onboarding today, the way you usually see it presented, when are some of those biggest opportunities for improvement that you’ve come across? What are a lot of people doing that might be better?
Kila:
It starts with what we need to do better. It’s a huge part of whether an employee decides to take an opportunity with our organization or remain with it. So, it impacts everything that goes along with the entire employee process. I see a lot that is being missed within the onboarding process, which is understanding where it starts. People believe the onboarding process starts on the employee’s first day. So, when they get in, you have to start onboarding them; you have to take their I-9 documents and ensure they know where the bathroom is, like all the important stuff.
I often ask people like; did they show you where the bathroom is? Do the things and people I’m bringing into organizations always like that? Most of the time, the answer is yes, thank goodness.
But people are missing the onboarding process, the way the market is today. In the candidate-driven market, we have seen that employees have options, have options most of the time, and I’m in the candidate landscape a lot. We run up against candidates who have multiple offers. I just had one accept an offer this morning. Yay! It was a great opportunity, but he had two other offers.
I say that the onboarding process starts after their first day. We collect those I-9 documents and show them the bathroom. It starts with your very first contact with that individual. So, it goes all the way through the interview process because you can very easily lose a candidate or an employee in that interview process to another company simply because your process is either scattered or disorganized or takes a long time.
They sometimes take two or three weeks. By then, they’ve already notified elsewhere and will start listening to the company. One of the biggest things is the need for clarification about when that starts.
Having an organized interview process, having the right people and seats for your interview and making sure that those people understand how to interview, meaning what kind of questions to ask and why they’re important. And then debriefing and understanding those individuals’ feedback is super important. And that’s part of the onboarding process, even though the employee has yet to start.
Kila and Nolan went further into the complete story of how we could progress at each stage of the employee onboarding journey. They discussed assisting people in making processes for welcoming others or giving them useful advice. Here are a few more questions that came up in the podcast:
- How are you working with organizations to create similar levels of engagement regardless of where that person is?
- We have the remote, which is what you talked about. There’s just a little more consideration into what that experience is like. So, for most organizations, then are you recommending they have this is what remote engagement, this is what remote onboarding looks like, and this is what regular onboarding looks like, and they’re going to be different?
- What about the variance? One variance we discussed is where you are in proximity, but there’s also who and what job you’re in. How are you, if at all, recommending that the type of resource customize the onboarding experience, whether that’s seniority, whether that’s it versus finance versus ops? What differences do you see there, if any?
- How long should my onboarding process take?
- How do you help support retention in that first thirty 60-90 days? What are the things within that program that support that need?
- Is there anything you feel we haven’t covered that you wanted to get in, whether that’s a funny story or an anecdote or don’t do this, anything like that, that you think we weren’t able to cover yet?
