How to Onboard Generation Z

According to Abode an early career onboarding platform. Early-career reneges and turnover don't just affect your bottom line; they also take a toll on morale and productivity, making them incredibly costly for your organization.

Joining me on this podcast to discuss is Ben Siegel their Co-founder & CEO. Below is a curated transcript of the conversation. We talked a great deal about onboarding Generation Z.

Origins of Abode Onboarding

I technically started abode six years ago during my junior year of college. We were mowing lawns for 25 bucks an hour at that point, but we've obviously turned into an enterprise HR tech platform. Really what we saw just over the years was ourselves through friends, through just a bunch of different pivots throughout the company.

Big companies struggle to engage and retain early career talent, and we consulted with some big employers for a while and ultimately decided to build a software platform to help them solve it back in July of 2021.

Failures of Current Onboarding

It's less about the actual onboarding and more when you think about who early career folks are and when they're getting jobs. They're signing offers in a couple of months from now, right? September, October. And then they don't start at the company until the following June.

And so unfortunately the most common story is you sign an offer to join a company, you don't hear anything for eight months, and then you're supposed to still show up on day one, excited and ready to go. And that kind of feeling from the interns and the new grads who are going through this is what leads to a lot of the turnover and the reneges that I'm sure everyone is hearing about on pretty much a daily basis at this point.

Why the Focus on Early Career Onboarding?

I think there's a lot of obviously great companies solving that for us. We feel like there's a lot of nuances within early career that make this a problem worth going after. For us, I think really the two biggest ones being one, who early career talent is today, right? Gen Z people. I'm technically Gen Z, I've had an iPhone, or I could have had an iPhone since I was in I think third or fourth grade.

We've just grown up in a very different way and that kind of translates to the expectations that we have in our personal and our work lives and just how we like to operate. So I think who early career talent is a big driver of that for us. And then also just some of the nuances that I described with offers going out months if not years in advance in some, and some companies really create this problem that is pretty hard for big companies to solve.

So early career makes a lot of sense for us right now, but I do think eventually as the company continues to grow, that we'll certainly move into serving on all levels of talent.

How does Abode work?

So as soon as you sign an offer, you're getting a text from us saying congrats and welcoming you to kick off your journey with whatever that company is. You click the link that's in your text and it opens up basically your home. That's why we call the company Abode for the next however many months or years until you go on to start at that company. What's in there is three main things.

One are resources that are specific to you, housing guides to the city that you might be moving to, welcome videos from the team you're joining, things like that. Some tasks that the company needs you to complete, filling out a survey to get your swag box or uploading a headshot for the directory or whatever. And then the third piece is community. So you could get to meet and build connections with the people that you're joining with and build friendships even prior to day one.

They actually can link out to their own social media as if they want to, or they can connect directly on our platform in what feels like a newsfeed that you would have on Facebook or LinkedIn or anything like that.

What Gen Z Wants from an Onboarding Experience

We did some research with about 5,000 Gen Z job seekers. We do that every year and we build our platform and update our platform based on what they want and need. And really the four things that they crave are connections, transparency, respect and expectations, right? And so transparency and expectations are easy.

They want answers to the questions that they have. They want to know what they're getting themselves into, and they also want to know who they're joining with. And so we brought all of that into one platform just to make it seamless and give them everything that they want and need all in one place.

Abode Integrations

So we integrate with all the big ATSs and HRSs. We have more kind of strategic partnerships with AMS, which is a big RPO solution, and we're partnered with SmartRecruiter and Yello as well.

How do compete as a stand alone solution?

Well, I think most onboarding solutions are built exactly for that, right? The things that legally make you an employee and allow you to kind of onboard and join that company. Where we focus is much more on the experience and the engagement side. So not just signing the documents that get you there, but all the other things that make it great to work at a company and get you excited, especially like I've said over those longer periods of time where you could start to maybe lose interest or start thinking about other things. That's more so where we fit in.

What is a renege?

Yeah, so renege would be when someone signs an offer to join a company and then ends up going to work somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest problems that exists within early career because of those extended periods of time and because of who Gen Z is and a lot of factors that play into it. But that I think if you ask anyone who hires early career talent that would at a minimum be in their top three problems they're trying to solve for most people would be probably priority number one.

Gen Z Onboarding Success Story

There's a good case study on our website, it's a big Fortune 50 healthcare company. They hire thousands of early career folks every year. Prior to being a customer of ours, they had about 20% reneges. So they would have roughly two or 300 people every year would sign and then not show up.

This past year with us, they had 7%. And I think the factors that play into that are really twofold. One, we've built the experience that Gen Z wants, and we know that because of the research that we've done with them, we've built it all in one platform, so they have everything they need, and we're able to eliminate a lot of anxiety, which ultimately is the cause of reneges, right? You get anxious, you don't have answers to your questions, you start looking, you go somewhere else.

We've been able to cut that by... Almost get rid of it completely. And then the second thing we do is we track all of their engagement and activity on our platform so that customers have true analytics behind who is actually engaged.

So without Abode, you've got a survey tool, probably you've got emails or a CRM, maybe you set up a LinkedIn group. Through the CRM, maybe you're getting opens and clicks. Through the survey tool, you're getting the answers, but you're not really seeing what's going on. And through LinkedIn, you're getting no analytics. We're giving them analytics on everything so customers can actually see who is truly engaged and who is not, and start to reach out proactively and get in front of these things before they happen.

What didn’t you know about Gen Z onboarding prior to launch?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, reneges in general, I didn't realize that that was a thing, right? I've never had a job myself. I've had internships and I've had poor experiences during that period of time, but I didn't realize how big of an issue it was, how many people, percentage wise, were signing offers to join a company and deciding to go somewhere else.

I think hearing that consistently from people like Dick's Sporting Goods, PWC, CrowdStrike, some of our early customers before we even built the platform, and realizing that it was such a big problem regardless of industry, right? Those are such different companies from each other, but they all struggle with the same things. That was kind of shocking to us, and really the driver of why we decided to build the platform in the first place.

Onboarding Content Tips

We've talked about it a couple of times already, but housing guides, videos from the teams that they're going to be joining. These interns and new grads are really interested in the office tours and what people are doing in and outside of work. So it is very just collaborative, I would say, as far as who the employee base is, getting them to contribute to the content so that you can get a real sense for what you're walking into on day one.

People are very interested in who their manager is, who their mentor might be, if there's a mentorship program, just generally who's in the org that they're joining. All of the above.

LINK: abodehr.com