Tydy Product: How a Belgium-based company engaged new graduates with an innovative preboarding journey

You know that familiar feeling of excitement and anticipation before heading out on a vacation or getting a new phone? As the much awaited day gets closer and closer, you are overcome by a sense of thrill and eagerness. It is almost as if time isn’t passing and every single minute feels like monumental hours standing between you and your dream vacation or phone.

Have you ever felt something similar before joining a new workplace? Is there that similar tingle of excitement, anticipation and thrill?

Chances are, many of us do feel it when we accept that job offer. But with days or even months left to start actual work with the new company, this enthusiasm can wear out or turn into anxiety really fast; faster if you are met with radio silence from your new employer. 

With graduate new hires, the situation gets doubly challenging. The normal period between offer acceptance and day one of employment is long enough for any feelings of excitement and anticipation to wear off. In the case of recruits from college campuses, this period is even longer, sometimes as long as 5-7 months. Anything can happen during this time. As they say, ‘out of sight, out of mind’!

For this particular Belgian company, which hires graduates in large numbers across the globe, maintaining that sense of excitement among their college hires was of significant importance. Their dedicated Graduate Program team that looks after campus recruitment and onboarding wanted to create an engaging preboarding journey that would not only keep the new hires excited about joining the company, but also nurture a sense of belonging, while setting them up for success.

But with offices spread across various countries and with multiple teams managing onboarding, they also had some real challenges to navigate.

1. How to create a preboarding journey that is standardized and unified for new graduates across the company?
2. How to deliver an experience that is personalized by team, location and the role of the new hire?

Building a standardized, unified and personalized preboarding journey

Tydy followed a four-step approach to create and drive the graduate preboarding journey from end-to-end.

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Step 1: Identify all the practices that should be part of the preboarding program

Tydy worked closely with the company’s Graduate Program team to identify and list preboarding practices that were already in place even if they weren’t standardized across teams. These mainly included occasional communication, administrative work, and document collection. 

The team also added other good-to-have preboarding practices to create a comprehensive list of activities such as multiformat communication, tasks, and surveys that could be part of the program.

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Step 2: Mapping different workflows

Tydy’s content & journey management team then worked with the Graduate Program team to understand the segregation and flow of activities based on Business Units (BU) and location. While all new graduate hires would get a standardized preboarding experience through the Tydy platform, each of their experiences would still be unique and personal to them. For instance, the training offered to the new graduates largely depended on the BU they were joining. The point of contact for each location and BU had to be different. The team introduction aspect of preboarding also needed to be personalized. 

Identifying and mapping these workflows was key to the next step - creating multiple preboarding journeys to drive a personalized experience.

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Step 3: Design multiple preboarding journeys for a personalized experience

Based on the mapping of workflows, Tydy’s journey management team created multiple preboarding journeys to suit the needs of multiple BUs and locations.

Content like company information, product details, sustainability goals, etc. was integrated into the preboarding journey as reading cards with bite-sized information for easy consumption. These would then be triggered to the newly hired graduates at a day and time pre-set on Tydy.

Pulse surveys were added to several touchpoints across the journey to collect timely, contextual feedback from the new hires.

A cohort-based and one-on-one chat was also activated on Tydy to create an easy pathway for communication between the new hires, within their cohorts and with their respective points of contact.

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Step 4: Track key metrics with a unified view of each new hire 

Once the program was launched, the Graduate Program team had access to a unified profile of each new graduate hire where they could view key individual metrics. The team could see the progress that the new hire had made in the preboarding journey, watch out for bottlenecks, check for disengagement and take immediate action, among other things.

The impact of the graduate preboarding program

Tydy’s personalized preboarding program created active and continuous engagement with their graduate hires, which earlier was a sporadic, fragmented, and manual process. The program saw a completion rate of 78% - 94.91% across different business units in the company.

Pulse surveys that ran during the program saw 85% completion rates with participants even sharing detailed responses to subjective questions, which is otherwise very rare.

Started in 2020, this customer continues to optimize and use the preboarding program to engage with their graduate new hires.

If you're looking for something similar for your candidates or new hires, we can help!

To see how this works, feel free to book a one-on-one demo with us.