If you’ve been following legal job boards these days, you’ll notice numerous new postings each week. When an organization needs to hire, everyone accepts that recruiting is a necessary cost of doing business. It takes time and money to advertise, work with recruiters, and interview candidates. If the best candidate accepts your offer, it feels as though your recruiting efforts were successful, and worth all the time and money invested. But hiring the right candidate doesn’t necessarily translate into a successful hire. Whether your recruiting efforts prove successful in the long term, is measured by how well your new hire integrates into your firm or company.
Start with orientation.
On arrival, a new hire receives the standard welcome and orientation. Following orientation, colleagues may implicitly be expected to support the new hire, but many hires are left to integrate largely through their own efforts. Sometimes colleagues are expressly asked to assist, but when things get busy, supporting the new hire takes a back seat, months pass, and the new hire isn’t as effective and productive as everyone had hoped. Everyone, including the new hire, wonders if they made the right choice.
Time and money spent on recruiting is lost unless your new hire feels connected, and becomes a productive member of your organization. Despite this, often law firms and legal departments still put most of their effort into recruiting, and spend relatively little time or money to ensure that the successful candidate becomes a valuable member of the organization.
Get more with an integration plan.
The first weeks and months are vital to support your new hire in making connections, and attaining necessary information and experience. Creating an integration plan is a good way to ensure this happens. To be fully integrated, your new hire must be socialized into the organization. They must also acquire the knowledge, skills, and behaviours which are necessary to succeed in your organization, but which are not covered or acquired in orientation.
Ideally, creating an integration plan should involve your new hire, and key components of the plan should be put in place even before their first day. Here are a few components to consider incorporating.
Set goals. Think about what your new hire and the organization want to achieve early in your new hire’s time in the workplace, the timeline for achieving those goals, and what success will look like.
Determine who the key stakeholders are, and make a plan for your new hire to meet them as soon as you they can before or after their arrival. Create a list and determine who should be prioritized for early meetings, and how certain individuals should be approached.
Prepare a short introductory message or elevator speech to share with existing members of the organization. Crystallize the key messages you’d like others to know, and share the message upon your new hire’s arrival. This can also serve as the foundation for how your new hire talks about themselves to key stakeholders they meet.
Think about finding a mentor for your new hire. Every new hire needs someone who will assist them to socialize into the workplace, and answer their questions. You might assign your new hire a formal mentor, or perhaps have someone commit to taking co-ownership of your new hire’s success.
Discuss work allocation, and consider what the expectations are. It’s important for your new hire to feel productive, and to contribute as soon as they can upon arrival. Think about how to ensure this happens.
Follow through.
Once you’ve created a plan, you need to follow through on it. There should be a process for holding individuals accountable, even when it gets busy. There should also be a mechanism for revisiting the plan with your new hire at regular intervals, and revising it as necessary. Just as you might choose to work with an external recruiter during the recruiting stage, if there aren’t sufficient resources within the organization, working with a coach or other external resource during integration could be the answer.
There aren’t any short cuts to doing it right. If you spend the necessary time and resources on your new hire during the first few months, they’re more likely to become an effective and productive member of your organization, and you’re less likely to find yourself recruiting a new “best candidate” instead.