We often hear HR teams and recruiting firms talk about the importance of the onboarding process when new hires are integrated into the organization. What we don’t hear as much about, however, is the importance of filling higher up roles in your company through inboarding. 

Below we’ll get into why inboarding is so important and how you can create an effective inboarding strategy today. 

Definition of inboarding

Inboarding has to do with how companies look to internal hires to cultivate leaders and fill managerial roles. It can also be referred to as a strategic approach to help retain high quality employees within your organization. 

How does inboarding differ from onboarding?

What onboarding involves:

• A process of integrating a new hire into your organization.
• Training of new hires to prepare them for their role.
• Allowing new hires to shadow employees in similar roles.
• Shadowing new hires in the first two weeks to help them acclimate to their new role. 
• All HR-related procedures and steps when taking on a new hire. 
• Answering any questions that your new hire may have. 
• Explanation of company values, culture, and etiquette.
• Explanation of responsibilities, expectations, deadlines, and timelines for new hires. 

What inboarding involves:

• Offering educational and career development opportunities to hires who show potential.
• Creating a strategy that helps cultivate talent within your organization to build team leaders and managers. 
• Training your current managers so they can form positive relationships with current employees to help increase retention. 
• Offering promotions to employees as opposed to seeking talent outside the organization. 
• Reminding managers to recognize hard work and encourage employees when they’re excelling in their roles. 
• Creating a company culture that encourages and rewards employees for their hard work. 
• Cross-training employees so that if an employee is sick or out on vacation, another employee can temporarily fill their role. 
• Improving employee engagement by offering new opportunities to current employees. 

Why inboarding is so important for your company’s success

While hiring outside talent is sometimes necessary, inboarding can help you save time and money when filling a role. It can also greatly improve your company culture and employee satisfaction, which leads to higher engagement, productivity, and retention.

Here are a few reasons why inboarding is essentially to your company’s success. 

• Inboarding strategies are an investment in your company’s future, ensuring you can fill the corporate ladder from within your organization. 
• In a Gallup poll, 87% of millennials said they value career opportunities as an important factor in their job. A robust onboarding strategy will appeal to your millennial employees and give you a competitive edge on the job market when seeking millennials candidates. 
• Inboarding will give employees who have worked in your company for years the platform to voice new ideas and generate new strategies. 
• Internal employees can make great managers and leaders because they know the ins and outs of your companies, including the unique challenges that your employees face. 
• Investing in inboarding will contribute to your company culture by sending the message that you value your employees and their contributions. 

You shouldn’t think about inboarding as an alternative to onboarding, but rather an additional strategy alongside onboarding. Integrating both hiring processes to fill your hiring needs will give you more flexibility, hiring leverage, and improve your overall company culture. 

How to implement a proper inboarding program at your organization

Inboarding programs work best when you take an infrastructural approach, making the process as much about leadership as it is company culture. Companies are already supposed to cultivate talent from within their organizations; inboarding is a way to systemize and prioritize those efforts.

Here are a few ways you can improve your inboarding strategies: 

• Offer employees educational/career development opportunities.
• Train managers to recognize and appreciate employees for accolades and hard work.
• Evaluate your current talent with assessment tools and identify which candidates might fit into leadership/managerial roles. 
• Promote from within your organization as opposed to hiring outside talent.
• Evaluate, assess, improve, and repeat. Inboarding is an infrastructural process that changes the way your organization cultivates talent. It requires you to constantly be looking for opportunities for improvement from within your company.  

How Crosschq can help

Crosschq’s leading reference checking, recruiting analytics, and assessment technology don’t just apply to outside talent. You can also make smart promotional decisions by tracking your employees’ growth from within your organization. 

Even with a robust inboarding strategy, most companies will need to look for talent from outside their company. Crosschq’s unparalleled hiring insights will help you take the guesswork out of hiring and make smarter hiring decisions.

Build and cultivate diverse, winning teams with Crosschq today.