Our customer needed to optimise their onboarding process for end-clients, and adapt the system to accommodate their background check requirements.
The existing onboarding process was 100% manual — our customer couldn’t keep up with the time needed to manage it, and their customers were becoming dissatisfied with the system’s limitations.
We used the Pontoon ON platform to fully automate the process.
The results?
A significantly speedier process, and a better experience for our customer, and their clients and candidates.
We were approached by our customer to help them out of an onboarding management hole.
The existing onboarding process was completely manual — and with 100 onboards every week, there was no way the in-house team could keep up with the daily management demands.
The company added more staff to the team, but it was no use — a time study revealed they were facing more than 330 manual processing hours a week, and would need more than 10 full-time employees working on nothing else to even keep up with the task.
Meanwhile, clients were becoming dissatisfied with the onboarding process: simple tasks were taking too long, turnaround times were causing delays, and giving feedback was a hassle.
Our customer needed an automated solution that would solve these problems — without losing the human touch that their clients value — and keep everything compliant.
Finding the right tech
At Pontoon, we believe in always using the right tools for the job. While we’ve got an impressive tech stack, we’re always looking for the simplest and most effective tool for our customers’ unique challenges.
Our Tech Lab consulted on this particular case by assessing a range of platforms and tools to see how each piece of the onboarding puzzle could be resolved.
Once they’d decided on the perfect tech, they added them to a sandbox environment and created a basic version of the customer’s onboarding process for testing.
12 of our programme teams were tasked with completing time studies on the new platform, so we could make sure our solution would be feasible — not just for this customer, but across our entire customer-base moving forward.
And sure enough, once our key stakeholders a test-run of the Pontoon ON platform with their own onboarding processes, they approved programme-wide implementation.
Automating reports for speed and transparency
To get the customer’s onboarding process started quickly, we partnered with their vendor management system (VMS) to configure a range of automated reports.
These reports would kick off the onboarding process for new candidates every two hours within the Pontoon ON platform.
Within just two minutes of receiving the VMS report, Pontoon ON sends individual email notifications to the candidate, supplier and hiring manager, informing them that the onboarding process is now live.
As the candidate completes more of the digital documents involved in the onboarding process, the system sends a status update request to the supplier — this is immediately pushed to the hiring manager for maximum visibility.
Every email is configured with dynamic fields so they’re personalised and consistent. There are also stopping points built into the process — these are vital opportunities for the team to engage personally, so candidates receive a great experience with that all-important human touch.
Candidate outreach
As part of building a better experience for everyone, we designed a specific candidate outreach process.
Now, all new offers receive a personalised congratulatory email and a welcome packet — the kind of warm welcome our customer’s team would have loved to offer previously but had no time for.
Our partnership with this customer has achieved some amazing results:
