How to personalise onboarding with AI
Ott Niggulis
New employee onboarding is a key step in the hiring process that lays the foundation for a successful work relationship. It’s not about the first day(s) being a memorable experience but rather planning the first days, weeks, and months to quickly bring the new employee up to full productivity.
As with many other aspects of hiring, there is a role for AI to create more engaging and personalised onboarding experiences. From planning tailored onboarding plans to providing hyper-personalized insights based on talent data, AI tools offer solutions that streamline the onboarding experience.
This article is part of a series on the benefits of Generative AI for executive search and leadership assessment professionals, including Part 1: Job Analysis (available here), Part 2: Candidate Summaries (available here), and Part 3: Interview Preparation (available here).
Start with a plan
Onboarding doesn’t just happen. Companies need to plan for it. Regardless of what you call it - be it an induction program, orientation plan, or a 100-day roadmap - the objective remains the same: a strategy aimed explicitly at accelerating the new hire's journey to peak productivity within a defined timeframe.
And while the specifics can vary depending on the industry and the role, most plans broadly cover:
Orientation and introduction - helping the new employee understand the company's culture, values, mission, and goals.
Role-specific training and development - equipping the new employee with the necessary skills and knowledge to perform their job effectively.
Integration and engagement - fostering a sense of belonging, connection, and teamwork. Including a constructive feedback loop. Crucial for retention and productivity.
Most companies will have an existing onboarding plan that is tweaked whenever a new employee is hired. Analysing that plan can be the first step in using AI in an onboarding process.
Alternatively, you can task the AI to come up with an onboarding plan for a specific position. The more context you can give about the role, the team, and the company, the better the results will be.
You may need to tweak the prompt (the instructions you give to your AI tool) or add constraints for best results. For example “Develop a 100-day onboarding plan for [role name and description] at [company and team description].”
In any case, having an onboarding structure/template that you are happy with is the basis for everything else.
Next, background information about the company, the role, and the candidate. As with everything else AI-related, the more detailed the input, the better the output will be.
This background information could come in the form of interview notes, job analysis results, job descriptions, a CV, a PDF with the new employee's LinkedIn Profile, an overview of the company, the structure of the function the new employee will be working at, etc.
Although the heavy lifting of analysing all the information is done by the AI, the human element cannot be underestimated. AI is an incredibly useful tool, but it does not replace the need for human oversight.
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Examples
As an example, I tasked ChatGPT with developing a 100-day onboarding plan for a Head of Marketing position. For context, I used Wisnio’s Chief Marketing Officer hiring scorecard, a PDF of the LinkedIn Profile of the new employee, a company overview plus the structure of the marketing function within the company.
As a result, I got a personalised three phase onboarding plan with concrete action steps along with measurable results. Next, I could go further and ask the AI to add more details or use the output as a basis for a more detailed plan.
Alternatively, you could take an existing onboarding plan, add the same information and ask the AI to modify the plan. So I did. I gave the AI a scorecard, employee information, a company overview, and the structure of the function within the company along with an example onboarding plan.
The AI had no problems using the structure of the example plan and gave me a detailed answer customised and personalised for the role and the person:
Hyper-personalised insights with talent data
Apart from making sure that a new employee gets up-to-speed and delivering in terms of their job responsibilities, another important aspect of onboarding is making sure that they fit into the existing team.
To ensure new employees not only excel in their roles but also integrate seamlessly with existing teams, most onboarding plans often include meet-the-team activities and, where applicable, psychometric assessments.
The problem is that although these assessments do indeed give valuable insights, the results are usually in a hard to read and understand PDFs that are even harder to put into practice.
To simplify this, we at Wisnio developed WisGPT, an AI chatbot with direct access to team members’ talent data (based on our proprietary assessments of personality, values, and competencies) to deliver hyper-personalised insights.
This adds a new layer of understanding that is hard to get using traditional psychometric assessments. With WisGPT, new employees can better understand the people and teams that they will be working with and how they fit into the existing team.
For example, one could ask the top three things to know when working with this team. Or how to work effectively with an individual member of the team:
Conclusions
Integrating AI into employee onboarding processes can significantly enhance the efficiency, personalisation, and effectiveness of welcoming new hires. From planning tailored onboarding plans to providing hyper-personalized insights based on talent data, AI tools offer innovative solutions that streamline the onboarding experience.
The role of AI in onboarding is doing the heavy lifting—analysing data, generating personalised onboarding plans, and facilitating administrative tasks—so that you can concentrate on what truly matters: connecting with new hires on a human level, understanding their needs, and ensuring they feel valued and integrated into their new roles from day one.
