Planning for Growth: How Domain Implemented an Experience-Driven Multi-Team Onboarding Strategy
Domain Group is a digital property portal and media giant that dominates print and digital property advertising with a staggering 90% market penetration. The organization employs more than 700 people across Australia.
The Problem
Domain Group had historically struggled with inconsistent and labor-intensive onboarding.
- When Domain Group separated from Fairfax Media in 2017 there was no real structured program in place for onboarding. The business was relying solely on hiring managers to own the process.
- Wanting to provide a consistent onboarding experience for all new starters, the Employee Experience team moved to a manual spreadsheet-managed process that involved emails, manual confirmations and a physical welcome handbook for new hires.
“The logistics of delivering a good onboarding experience were overwhelming, we had new hires starting all the time on different days and no visibility over what had been sent to them or what had already been organised. The spreadsheet was supposed to be tracking these things - but keeping it up to date involved a lot of manual follow ups and new hires were falling through the cracks.”
- Understanding the need to streamline the process, they started digitizing onboarding, introducing a single intranet-style landing page to supplement the spreadsheet-managed process. This was intended as a one-stop destination for new hires, with the goal of making the process easier.
“Introducing the static page didn’t do anything to improve the experience as new starters would simply be sent a link and it would be left to them to navigate the high volume of information contained there. The new starters were not absorbing or engaging with the information.”
Goal One - Support managers during rapid growth
As Domain Group grew from 200 to 700 employees in under two years, there was a strong emphasis on ensuring new starters were onboarded effectively and engaged within the business.
“Like in any business, some managers were great leaders who were invested in onboarding, but our rapid growth meant we also had first time managers who needed more support while they developed as leaders so they could do the best for their teams.”
Goal Two - Great employee experience as the ultimate goal
“We had challenges around consistency and that was a focus, but overall we wanted to make our onboarding experiences great for our new hires.”
Aware of how critical the first 90 days are for new hires in terms of employee engagement and retention, the initial goal for the Employee Experience team was to deliver consistent and automated onboarding, but ultimately they wanted to ensure they were delivering great employee experience.
“We looked at other workflow tools, like ServiceNow, but Enboarder offered much better ease of use for the administrator and we loved how clean and simple the notifications and content delivery was. Enboarder provides a look and feel that is truly experience driven and user centric, beyond what the traditional systems could offer. There are other systems that can send a workflow, but they don’t offer the same seamless user experience for the administrators, managers and new hires.”
The Solution
Domain is now using Enboarder for onboarding nationally and helping new hires know how to succeed at Domain.
Most teams have concurrent onboarding workflows with specific business unit content. For example, each sales team has a workflow to cover product and system knowledge to help get them up and running in their markets. This online learning is supplemented by face-to-face training.
The Employee Experience team were looking for a solution that delivered information at exactly the right time, rather than overwhelming new hires with a flood of information at once, as the original intranet portal did.
“We wanted to prompt managers at the appropriate times to ensure they were getting the support they needed without interrupting their day.”
Domain’s Employee Experience team integrated their HRIS Cornerstone with Enboarder to automatically trigger the onboarding experience for managers and new hires each time a new staff member signs their letter of offer.
“We wanted to be able to hit the ‘hire’ button and for the process to be completely digital and automated from that point on.”
How will Enboarder super-charge your onboarding journey?
The Results
“After implementing Enboarder we are consistently getting 95% positive scores from our new starter surveys.”
Domain has onboarded 283 new hires in the past 12 months and their employee NPS scores are extremely strong at 83 for that same time period, as they can now consistently deliver a great experience.
“Enboarder has helped us improve employee experience levels more broadly - when people are engaged as they walk in the door that sets us up well in the long run.”
In terms of cost savings and efficiencies, using Enboarder enabled the Domain Employee Experience team to re-allocate the headcount of the person who was previously managing the manual onboarding process, focusing the role on other value-adding activities in the team.
“We can now collect real time feedback directly from new hires at key touchpoints in their onboarding process, and that allows us to iterate on the workflows and follow up with people directly if there’s a problem we can fix.”
Here’s what some of Domain’s new hires said about their onboarding experience:
“With onboarding, it’s about starting small and making it happen. Your onboarding process is never finished, people change and businesses change and your onboarding needs to move with that flow.”
Domain has onboarded 283 new hires in the past 12 months and their employee NPS scores are extremely strong at 83 for that same time period, as they can now consistently deliver a great experience.
“Enboarder is so incredibly easy to use, I recently taught the platform to a new staff member and it only took two hours and he’s now setting up workflows. At the end of the day, Enboarder has allowed us to deliver that consistently-great new starter experience and it makes your HR team look like champions.”