Zapier scales their onboarding program during explosive growth, creating consistent & exceptional new hire experience

⚙️ Problem

What do you do when your onboarding program can’t keep up with your hiring volume?

Imagine trying to keep up with the demands of an incredibly manual onboarding process as your company is experiencing massive headcount growth.

That’s exactly where we met Ashley Priebe Brown, Onboarding Program Manager at Zapier.

“When I started [at Zapier], we had a great onboarding program, the content was really, really solid, and new hires were giving us great feedback, but everything behind the scenes was manual.” Ashley mentioned during our exclusive interview with her.

…and all of this manual work wouldn’t scale at the rate necessary to keep up with the headcount growth that Zapier was experiencing.

Ashley and her team were keeping busy with onboarding tasks like:

• Manually creating and updating teammate profiles in her HRIS,
• Pairing up and assigning buddies,
• Swapping personal emails to work emails,
• Assigning LMS lessons to new hires,
• Scheduling calls,
• Updating various calendars with new hire start dates, and
• Creating new Slack channels for each new hire

Ashley knew the lead up and the first 90 days for her candidates were crucial (and that poor onboarding accounts for 43% of employee turnover during the first month according to Business Insider!).

…but how could she and her team possibly keep up with this day-to-day busywork and learn how to create a consistently extraordinary new hire experience at a company with a 100% remote workforce, experiencing an explosive increase in headcount across 30 different countries?

💡 Solution

Don’t be a robot. Build a robot.

“Don’t be a robot, build the robot” is one of Zapier’s core values, so Ashley and her team set out to find a way to add some automation to their onboarding process with Zapier.

Ashley quickly found that the ‘no-code’ automations she built in Zapier did save her several clicks, but they didn’t solve the consistency piece:

She could do things like automatically adding candidate-provided information into her HRIS, but she still had to do a bunch of manual tasks, like remembering to assign the correct candidates up to the right workflows and trigger all of the right events on time.

Her current onboarding software didn’t work with Zapier, so Ashley turned to Enboarder.

“Enboarder has a great API, but what really sets them apart is that they really care about the employee experience.”
(Awww! Thanks, Ashley! We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!)

By using her new automations and offloading all of the scheduling, communications, and notifications onto Enboarder, Ashley was able to focus her time and energy on creating a truly exceptional onboarding experience that her new hires love.

👑 The Results

“Now we’re focused on the employee experience.”

Between the Zapier automations, and Enboarder’s onboarding sequences Ashley set up, Zapier’s productivity calculator estimates that Ashley and team saved 206,185 minutes of mindless clicking in the first year of automating their onboarding program. That’s equivalent of 86 work weeks, or having 1.5 full time employees who’d have to be completely devoted to these manual, non-value add tasks.

…So, what has Ashley and the team done with all that extra time?

“We started sending out a lot of employee surveys that uncovered some good areas of improvement. For example, our candidates said the onboarding information we were sending was great, but the way we were presenting it was overwhelming.”

From these learnings, Ashley and the Zapier team were able to make some key changes that radically improved their new hire experience.

For example, now having time to reflect on Zapier’s current onboarding process and her own previous experience in education, Ashley was able to replace the ad-hoc training that new hires were experiencing with a more structured 2 week onboarding program based on topical learning clusters, which helped the new hires absorb more data while reducing feelings of overwhelm during their first two weeks.

“Enboarder is the glue that connects all our HR systems together, ensuring that new hires and the onboarding stakeholders receive the right info, at the right time, and helps us see where the new hire is in every step of the journey.”

As if the massive time savings wasn’t benefit enough, Ashley also reported a 10% increase in hiring manager participation with her onboarding initiatives – (Which is ultra important since 72% of employees say one-on-one time with their direct manager was the most important part of any pre-boarding or onboarding process).

Now, instead of filling their days with pointless clicking, Ashley and her team are spending their days ramping up new hires – not only helping them become productive, but also helping them feel connected to their teams, colleagues and the broader business.

…and isn’t that really the goal?

(Want to see Zapier’s step-by-step onboarding experience? Watch our exclusive interview with Ashley here.)

Industry:
Software & Technology

Company size:
550+ employees

Use case:
Onboarding