Why the moments after "yes" matter most and how to design them intentionally

Um, as Dan said that, um, my job this earlier this year, I was tasked with, um, kind of upgrading our candidate experience. And I'm with Cottage Health. I've been in TA for 30 years. Um, both in HR, tech and healthcare, recruiting and sourcing, recruitment, marketing, employer branding, kind of a jack of all trades within TA. And um so at Cottage Health, as Dr. Mallalerie had mentioned, um health care is growing, but yet we have a shortage of talent. And so it's really important that we keep a hold of those individuals that do say yes. So trying to design every moment that followed that yes was my task. And how could I use technology um to help with that? So that's what I'm hoping to share with you today. and you can get some uh nice takeaways. So, let's see if we can move this here. Okay, so the journey um it for the new hire, it starts after the yes, not on day one. Many of us think, oh, day one, that's the you know, that's when everything starts, but it really is after that yes. That's when we the work really starts to ensure that the candidate receives that first class experience. So, do you remember that excitement that you felt? Maybe you're feeling it right now when you're starting something new. You're excited. You're nervous. You have a ton of questions. But from the employer side, this is the time when we can lose those new employees that we work so hard to get. As Dan mentioned, that candidate experience or that pre-boarding is not to the level of their expectations. So, we have to make that journey visible. Many companies, even ours, we hold on to that information for whatever reason. I don't know why we all do this, but we hold on to it for like the week before someone starts or the day before someone starts and we start to lose a little bit of trust with our new candidates. We hire some people two months before they start. Well, we all get spam messages and scam messages and so we want to make sure that we continue through this journey, just this very first part, that we continue to build that trust. So, the more information we can share with them in a welcoming and thoughtful manner is really important. So, what does that look like? Well, for us, this was our reality not that long ago. Um, our reality was, excuse me, our reality was a very textheheavy email. It had a lot of information that most companies we do, we have a lot of information that somebody needs for their onboarding. But this black and white textheavy, you don't get very excited when you see this. You go from that image before of, "Oh, I can't wait for this journey. " to, "Oh my gosh, look at what's in front of me. " So, a lot of times what happens is you open this up and you go, "Oh, okay. Well, let me get back to it. " So, you put it somewhere in your email, maybe you mark it, you star it, um, and you're going to come back to it later in that night or maybe a day or two, but now you can't find it. It's not easy accessible. It's um it's just it's not a self-s serve approach. It's just blah. So, our goal, my goal was to share this information in a more welcoming manner. So, I don't know how many of you have received an email like this when you've joined a company, but I know I have in the past and I got one just like this um when I joined Cottage Health a couple years ago. So, again, to what Dr. Mallerie had mentioned is we have this shortage of talent in healthcare. Even though we're growing, we have to hold on to this talent. those people that say yes to it. So, every moment then sends a signal. We had all the right information in that long textheavy email that we're sending out, but we're sending out the wrong signals. It wasn't really an experience. It was just a laundry list of things that somebody needed to do. It wasn't exciting. It wasn't inviting. It's not welcoming. It's extremely overwhelming. You miss a lot of key details in it. So, what I wanted to do was take that information and then you turn it into something that's more structured, more user friendly, and honestly something that's more inviting. So, and also a key piece to this is a we have a lot of questions from new hires and so there are a lot of questions going back and forth and a lot of them are the same questions by everybody and so we want to make sure that we capture that as well.

So the goal was what we found throughout this process and what I did was I met with our employee health managers. recruiters, our TA business partners. I did work with our marketing a little bit um and other business partners to really understand what the ultimate goal should be in this new welcoming approach to our candidate experience and that onboarding. People don't read long emails. We all know this. I mean 3 seconds maybe 5 second attention span is pretty much all we get. We scan things. We are just a scanning society. We want things quick. We read a headline and move on. Maybe we get three sentences of something. So, we miss a lot of things when we just scan and then those questions come back to the recruiters and to the TA business partners again and again. So, that goal was to make it really easy to navigate, really easy to come back to. they can bookmark what we created and ultimately something that empowers the new hireer to selfs serve and ultimately of course we want to stand out from our competition you know we that healthcare again it's a challenging market there's not a lot of people out there looking as Aaron mentioned the big stay people are holding on to their jobs but we need them we have those openings and so we want to make sure that we stand out from our competition And this was one way that we thought we could be able to do this. Um, and we al also wanted to kind of have a one destination for everything or just about everything that a new hire would need. So, some of these key design principles that I mentioned. So, you remember that textheavy black and white email with some highlighted things that we were giving out just a few months ago. So now we have a more simple, structured, scannable content, clear to call to action, and self-service. So by structuring the experience a little bit differently, you can see it's definitely more engaging. I mean, I hope it puts a smile on someone's face when they get this email after they've said yes to us that it says welcome. Before we I think it typed out welcome. This way, you know, we have this welcome banner. um you now have it says congratulations and what I love about um Outlook is it does the confetti when they open it. So that's always a lot of fun. But um so you have the congratulations message and then you have your onboarding and orientation button at the top. You don't have to go searching for it. We really wanted to make this as simple as possible. So you have the onboarding orientation button at the top. we still have the content that we have to share with them about their um appointments and orientation um locations and maybe what to bring with them. So, we do still break it up, but as you can see from previously, it was this black and white format. Now, we have it in this um more of a bordered colored bordered approach. It's just easier on the eyes and you know where you need to go. But it was definitely um the first step in all of this was this new email. So as I mentioned, we now have this onboarding and orientation button. And I'll show you in a moment what that leads to. So what we ended up creating was a centralized onboarding hub for this new hire journey. So how did we do this? Well, we used hire easy, we used their landing pages and the easy agent. So as Dan had mentioned that tech that AI component. So what I did was I just went into uh the easy agent within the landing pages and I just started writing what I wanted. I was looking for an onboarding page for new hires orientation onboarding FAQs. Um and I just started listing everything. And then it uh then created a landing page that was all formatted for me which was wonderful. And then I could start going in and I could edit, I could format, I could put our pictures in, I could put links. Um, it was wonderful. So, we created the centralized onboarding hub that was something new that they could not just use once, but multiple times throughout the pre-boarding experience. So, instead of this oneanddone communication, it truly became a more guided journey. And just as important that it was more about organizing the information to share with new hires. It was about making sure that from the moment they said yes to us at Cottage Health that they continued to feel welcome the whole time. So let me

share with you. You can scan this QR code so you can see it. But let me show you what we actually created here. This has been up now for we're going on two months. And so that button in that email when they click on it, this is the page that they come to. Can everybody see this page? Just want to make sure that we're good to go here. — Yep. — Okay. Fantastic. So this is our landing page within Higher Easy. And so now when they get that e that beautiful welcome banner email with the congratulations confetti they have this link and all of the and this right here was created by hireer easy as well these tiles these sections up here. So it already had provided that for me um with these different sections. I added the our of course our logo here which then takes you to our main page. But this is what they get the onboarding journey time frame. This is some of the biggest questions we get. How long is it going to take? So if we're bringing somebody on board and they're starting in 2 weeks, they need to get things started right away. If they're starting in 2 months, then maybe they can wait a week or two. But this kind of gives them an idea of how long these items will take. And this is really important because we get so many questions about this. And people don't realize how long some of um some of these steps can take in their onboarding process. We also with healthcare, you have a lot of health screenings you have to go through and there's different um two different types for us. So, we needed to make this very clear cuz this was another area that we had a challenge with that people didn't understand that there were two different um screenings they had to do. So, I'll just use this right here. So, you click on that section up there. It takes you to the work location. Again, we have different types of employees and where they're working. And so there's different processes in regards to their screenings and how to get this done and then where they can go and then our onboarding. So again, if you are an on-site employee, your onboarding is a little bit different, but you know, you have a lot of questions. I'm a fully remote employee, so I would like to know how am I going to get my equipment? What should I expect? And so letting them know um how to do your I-9 verification. So, if you're on site, you're going to do it one way. If you're a remote employee like myself, it's going to be different. Um, we also provided contact information for them. And then a resource guide. Many of our um, new hires, they need to either have their certification already in certain things or they can get it renewed. And this way, it made it very easy. They didn't have to go search and find out what the class schedule was to get their uh, BLS certification or if they're a security guard. Um, so where they have to go. We just wanted to make it very easy for everybody. And then we have our day one ready. So looking forward to orientation. A lot of people want to know what does orientation look like? And previously um like many organizations, maybe you don't send the orientation information out till the Friday before they start. Well, there's a lot of things that somebody may need to get um put in place before they start their new job on a Monday. And so we thought this would be a much better approach is to do the orientation along with the onboarding. So again they click on this and these this is a separate page landing page in um higher easy but they're connected through the two pages. So with our orientation now they get that same welcome to cottage health banner and we have testimonials. both of these buttons right here. Um, they hop down to those uh sections, but we have testimonials, we have our video. Again, that welcoming like I made the right choice to be with this organization that they feel good about that yes that they made maybe 2 months ago, 6 months ago, 2 weeks ago. Just want to make sure that they still feel that welcome connection. So that orientation schedule again, this is what most people are wanting right here is this. What does the day look like? Um where am I supposed to go? So this information is really important. Um for most people that's what they're looking for. So again, we spell out the important information there. And then meet our leadership. I thought this was really key. Um I just attended in my orientation. I've been here 2 years and I just went to my orientation last month. Um, but this was really key to have this in here because each one of these individuals, they speak at orientation. It does I mean there's a

lot of people here, but they introduce themselves at the very beginning and they take like a minute or two. Um, it's really great. It was wonderful for me because as I showed up and I saw some of these people, I could introduce myself and you know, it was a really great experience and I noticed others um in the morning doing the same. So, I thought this was really important to have that in there. And then of course we have our FAQs. And these this helped because these are the types of questions that most people are constantly going back and forth with our recruiters about. And I'm sure that you get these same questions as well. Um but this way most of them are answered right here. What's nice about these landing pages within Higher Easy is I can go in and make an edit any point in time and then it's refreshed and if somebody gets it today, later today after I make an edit, it'll be there. Somebody who got it 3 weeks ago, it'll they can, you know, pull up the link and that new information will be there. So, it's really helpful to have this again, contact information and then they can hop right back over to the onboarding journey. So really helpful information. We have seen a decrease in the amount of questions that our TA team is having to answer now because they have these FAQs because they have the orientation information because the employee health information. we really structured it to from the new hire perspective thinking about everything that they would need, all the different types of questions um that they would ask. And so we wanted to make sure that we really did think about everything from offer to day one. So um that was really important to us to kind of ease some of that um first day anxiety that people may have. So, and at the end of the day, this wasn't about just improving a process. It really was making sure that every new um there's that still that shortage of talent and people are not looking to leave. And when they do say yes, we don't want to lose them. them to a counter offer with their current employer. We don't want to lose them in that downtime before they start to another, you know, to one of our competitors. We want to make sure that we are treating them, you know, with that support and providing them with the confidence that they made a right decision in choosing our organization, choosing Cottage Health. So, it really does. The other thing that we're hoping that this will help with is first year turnover. that we that those numbers go down and that our retention um you know stays um high. We do have just so you know we do have over 60% of our workforce has been with us for 15 or more years. So we do have um really strong retention numbers but we want to make sure right now and how this market is that those first year um hires to us that they stay they stick. That's really important to us. And so we wanted to make sure that we shaped how someone feels about our organization long term with these steps. — Love it, Michelle. I think the biggest takeaway is if you're going to go back to your organization today, connect with HR or whoever does that onboarding training and maybe go through it. What do they get? What are those emails look like? Is there anything that we can revamp and put it in a landing page that it's going to be more of a userfriendly experience, candidate experience? We always talk about it as recruiters, but this is a way to use utilize technology even if you don't have to be a web developer to do some of this stuff. You can throw in some prompts, throw in some um marketing materials from your marketing team and creating an experience that people not only come to your organization but they finally stay at the organization would help the retention um that actually sometimes falls back on the TA organization. So — well that's the one thing Dan is that you don't have to have a web background of any kind. Hire easy walks you through it. Um and if you don't have hire easy you can use PowerPoint. you can do word. Um, so you can work with what you have, but if you have higher easy and you didn't know about this, that's all there for you, too.