How to Keep New Hires Engaged and On Board

You’ve made the effort of hiring a new professional, putting money, resources, and time into it, first, giving them a desk and computer, and then leaving them alone. But at the end of the first day both you and the newcomer are unhappy, thinking you’ve made the wrong choice. Finally, you hear what you dreaded: they’re quitting after a single day.

What happened? It all comes down to support. What does your company think about new hire guidance? Do you assign mentors to new hires? Are there clear goals for new hires during the onboarding period? Let’s see why this is important.

New hire turnover rate and the importance of guidance

Bringing a new software engineer into a team isa highly anticipated moment:on one side the desire, the challenge, the new opportunity, on the other the long-awaited extra hand to help with the workload. So seeing the new hire leave immediately is like losing all your money to a bad bet. What’s worse: this is a very common issue in this industry.

About 20% of employees leave within their first 45 days of employment.  Now, poor software developer retention occurs for all kinds of reasons. Although you can’t predict or prevent every scenario, new hires often leave when they haven’t received the training they need.

It’s crucial to provide on-the-job guidance to new employees, regardless of their level of experience. This includes familiarizing them with your company’s procedures and work methods. To set new hires up for success in their roles, it’s important to ensure they have the necessary resources before expecting them to work independently.

Having a comprehensive onboarding process will enable the new hire to feel comfortable in their role and will help you get results from them sooner. 

Now, let’s discuss some newcomer guidance practices you can apply right now.

Best newcomer welcome and guidance practices

Providing guidance and support can help ease the transition for new hires and reduce the stress and anxiety that can come with starting something new,which in turn decreases software developer turnover rate. So, let’s see three best practices of new hire guidance and how to apply them.

• Effective teams have good onboarding documents to provide to new hires, like step-by-step guides, how-to setup, keys, and accesses. These documents have to be live, and open to changes and improvements, which means that paper and books are not the best approach.
• Another good practice is to ask the new software engineer to update or make notes to the onboarding documents when something is unclear or missing. Getting them involved in this way increases their investment in the process.
• Networking and introductions are a big part of the onboarding  process for newcomers. Be sure to introduce them to the people they will need to know in order to do their jobs most effectively. When new hires know where to get the information and the knowledge they need they will feel more comfortable in their new work environment.

Implementing these practices can help your new software developer feel welcome and included in their new environment, and will help your company avoid having a new employee quit after day one.

The easiest way to achieve smooth onboarding with new software developers 

Many business owners don’t have the time or resources to have a team member solely dedicated to training new software developers and mentoring them through the process. Nor do they have a staff member who can be dedicated to keeping the new hire motivated and ensure that their career goals are aligned with your business needs.

That’s why an increasing number of CEOs and CTOs are hiring their software developers through staff augmentation companies. These are talent-matching experts that take care of training and development. They are dedicated to helping companies by handling employee motivation, retention, and guidance from the get-go. 

Staff augmentation companies have access to a larger pool of qualified candidates than an individual company. They can help identify candidates that are a better fit for the role meaning that new employees have a lower risk of leaving a company soon after being hired. 

At BEON, we’ve gone a step further. We’ve worked with top-tier talent for the past 10 years, which has enabled us to capture and outline employees’  reasons for leaving a workplace and develop actionable strategies to prevent it. 

We have a dev-focused Talent Experience Management Program in place, which . enables us to implement these retention strategies, including things like mentorship programs, cultural competency curricula. As a result, senior tech talent from BEON had an average retention rate of 2+ years in 2021.

Key takeaways

• About 20% of employees leave within their first 45 days of employment. 
• It’s crucial to provide on-the-job guidance to new employees, regardless of their level of experience.
• Staff augmentation companies have access to a larger pool of qualified candidates than an individual company and can also provide guidance to newcomers.
• At BEON, we have a Talent Experience Management Program that takes care of these issues so you don’t have to.