A Q&A With Kelly Pope, Onboarding & Development Program Manager at Eurest

Onboarding tips from a human connection veteran

Are you looking for a new onboarding partner and curious what it’s like to work with Enboarder? 

We recently invited one of our rockstar customers, Kelly Pope, onboarding & development program manager at Eurest, for a lunch-and-learn chat in our Austin office. Kelly’s career at Eurest started right out of college, and in her current role she’s supporting onboarding, front-line development, and training courses.

While visiting the office, she dished about why Eurest needed to modernize their onboarding process, why they chose Enboarder, and how they’re using Enboarder for learning and in-person networking.

Check out the highlights from our conversation below!

What made you look for an onboarding solution?

When I started, Eurest had no formal onboarding program, so I came in with a bunch of ideas. My team had a bunch of ideas. We started implementing them all before quickly realizing that one person probably wasn’t enough to do all of that. We’re hiring one hundred people per month, and we were just finding that we didn’t have the resources or the time to execute on all those great ideas.

Why did you choose Enboarder?

I remember setting up hundreds of 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins for new hires from my personal Outlook. And I was like, “This is silly.” If all Enboarder did was manage and scale that process, I probably would’ve bought it just from that one thing. All the other stuff was just gravy on top.

I like that it’s customizable. I like that we can plug and play with the things that we need to make our people feel like it’s super personalized while also automating the pieces that were taken up a lot of the time.

I’m able to create this high-touch, personalized connection with more than one thousand people per year with something that I don’t really have to think about most days – that’s just happening in the background. 

How is Enboarder supporting your learning programs, such as GULL?

GULL stands for Global University for Lifelong Learning, and it’s a front-line development program Eurest has run for more than 15 years.

A few years ago, we decided to scale the program across the company. Without Enboarder, I would have had to manually stay on top of weekly emails providing details about course content, checklists of things to remember, links for calls, etc.

Now, it’s all housed and living right in Enboarder. I would not have been able to run GULL without the Enboarder tool. In my first year running the program, I think we had 40 people, and in just a few weeks we kick off with 179. So there’s no way I could have communicated with all those people at once. I don’t even think I can send 400 emails at once through Outlook. So yes, we rely heavily on Enboarder to be able to execute that program.

You’re in town for a conference where you’re using Enboarder’s Connection Networking Game. How did it go?

We run a lot of trainings, and I come up with a lot of cheesy icebreaker activities! You never know how those things are going to go over, especially with executives. But they were all about it. It was heartwarming to see everyone, even our CEO, participating. It was a nice way to ease some of us into getting to know our co-workers better.

Want to hear more about Eurest’s story and how other Enboarder customers are making connected onboarding a priority? Check out this webinar: “From Moments to Momentum: Making Connection a Priority in the Workplace.”