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How do the six stages of the employee lifecycle impact organizations?

Learning and Development | 4 Min Read

How do the six stages of the employee lifecycle impact organizations?

Introduction

Employee lifecycle is a human resources model involving several stages to define an employee’s journey in the organization. It explains how an employee progresses within the company from selection to exit.

Improving the efficiency of these six employee lifecycle stages helps enhance the employee’s experience with the company, which reduces turnover and improves satisfaction. For this reason, the model is an optimum HR strategy to retain employees, reduce hiring costs, and ensure high employee morale.

This blog will discuss six stages of the employee lifecycle and best practices to improve process efficiency.

 

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What are the stages of the employee lifecycle?

Organizations can attract top talent by engaging candidates in every stage of employee lifecycle management. Evaluate how these six stages work:

 

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Attraction

The first stage of employee lifecycle management is attraction, where the position becomes available in the organization. The HR team posts job openings on various portals to attract relevant candidates. After this, candidates evaluate the job description to decide if they want to work with this employer or look for other opportunities.

Therefore, this implies that the first impression of the organization is the critical factor in attracting skilled talent.

 

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Organizations can build their employer brand to excel at this stage by:

  • Building the company’s reputation and brand through social media by posting about the company’s culture and environment.
  • Creating a crisp and valuable job description. Ensuring that necessary details are covered in the description, such as soft skills, tech skills, role requirements, about the company, etc.
  • Allowing potential candidates, a sneak-peak into the company’s culture through a video. Helping them understand how business prioritizes innovation and employee growth.
  • Mentioning employee benefits and growth opportunities in the job description to help candidates gauge personal growth chances.

Recruitment

Once candidates have applied to an open position, hiring managers move to the recruitment stage of employee lifecycle management. It involves shortlisting relevant applications, conducting interviews, taking assessments, etc.

HR managers can improve the experience at this stage by:

  • Clarifying skills and responsibilities of the role in the initial interview. It helps employees gauge if they fit the position.
  • Involving existing company employees to encourage talent, clarify candidate doubts, and take interviews to find the right candidate.
  • Offering attractive compensation to candidates, such as health insurance, bonuses, etc.
  • According to LinkedIn’s survey, 45% of employees switch roles because of a lack of growth opportunities. Hence, offering valuable growth opportunities and implementing L&D strategies can help recruit skilled professionals.
  • Discussing the company’s culture with the candidate clearly, such as work timings, work-from-home situation, holidays, leaves, etc.

Onboarding

The orientation and onboarding stage of employee lifecycle management is crucial to define a candidate’s experience in the company. At this stage, recruiters should focus on helping new employees adjust to the culture, understand the hierarchy, and get comfortable with work patterns.

During onboarding, new employees should understand the company’s values, goals, long-term plans, and communication patterns. Understanding these key factors helps build the foundation for organizational and personal growth.

Onboarding can be made smoother by:

  • Making new professionals feel valued and welcomed in the organization. This can be driven by peer communication, interaction with the management, etc.
  • Offering information related to the company’s structure, job role, etc.
  • Clearly define the expectations of an employee. What should be their goal? What work may they handle? Do they need to delegate tasks?
  • Providing training for business products and solutions in the case of B2B companies. This will allow the employee to deeply understand products and solutions, which will aid the execution of tasks.
  • Starting digital onboarding before the employee visits the office. This will help them evaluate the company’s culture comfortably.
  • Arranging a Q&A session for new employees at the end of onboarding to address specific questions.
  • After 30, 60, and 90 days, follow up through a survey or questionnaire to analyze whether the employee is adjusting to the culture.

Retention

The retention stage starts when the employee is onboarded and has started working on the job role. Ideally, retention processes consistently stay alive till the employee separates from the organization. It involves keeping employees satisfied, motivated, and happy.

A few tips to improve retention are:

  • Creating a program for employee recognition and rewards. This will help ensure that your company has a nurturing culture where employees are recognized and praised for their hard work and efforts.
  • Encouraging managerial employees to build valuable relationships with their team members for smooth communication and issue resolution.
  • Organizing an issue-resolution meeting monthly to patiently listen to and resolve employees’ problems.
  • Respecting your employees and encouraging transparency within the company. With better visibility, employees work better.
  • Creating a feedback loop from employees to HR to regularly receive constructive feedback about the culture, team dynamics, etc.
  • Understanding motivators, such as growth opportunities, engagement activities, etc., to engage employees.

Development

Once employees adjust to the company’s culture and working schedule, they look for development opportunities. The ability to develop skills, learn new things, and evolve is imperative for employees’ career growth. Therefore, HR managers should evaluate growth and learning requirements and sketch a career path for different types of employees.

Some tips to understand employees’ growth needs are:

  • Openly discussing with employees about their career goals. They are the best people to explain their learning needs.
  • Encouraging team leaders and managerial employees to motivate team members for continuous learning.
  • Organizing lunch and learning sessions for brainstorming and idea-sharing.
  • Utilizing the skills of existing employees to train those who need to develop these skills. Peer learning improves outcomes.

Mercer | Mettl’s Training Needs Analysis Assessment allows recruiters to find skills gaps within teams and create relevant training programs based on the results. The assessment’s structured process helps identify challenges in employees’ reskilling and upskilling patterns, which helps create a valuable L&D strategy.

 

Further, Training Effectiveness Assessment helps gauge the effectiveness and impact of a training model. For example, what was the employees’ reaction, were they able to learn, what was their behavior after the training, and what was the overall outcome?

Separation

The last stage is separation, where the employee is offboarded or leaves the company. There are multiple reasons why an employee might leave the company, such as retirement, personal reasons, better opportunity, lay off, etc.

Regardless of the reason for separation, offer a positive experience to the employee to help them remember your brand by:

  • Ensuring that other people are not disrupted, so the employee leaving the company can also transition smoothly.
  • Taking feedback once the employee resigns. This will allow identifying the potential loopholes and challenges in internal processes.
  • If you’re laying off an employee, offer them guidance and be empathetic. Help them transition smoothly and provide recommendations for future employment.

 


Benefits of using employee lifecycle strategies

Mapping your employee journey like the customer experience journey helps retain talent and improve the employer brand. Organizations can reduce hiring expenditures, boost training programs, engage teams, and increase productivity.

 

The benefits of employee lifecycle management are:

  • Valuable experiences throughout the employee lifecycle improve corporate performance and employee efficiency. Employees are engaged and motivated to complete their work.
  • Recognizing employees and providing them opportunities for growth to help achieve the businesses and employees’ personal goals.
  • Streamlining employee encouragement strategies throughout the employee lifecycle helps professionals think innovatively, contributing to long-term business growth.
  • Ensuring continuous involvement of business stakeholders from the attraction stage helps reduce the gap in training and employee skills.

 


How to assess and enhance the employee lifecycle experience?

Assessing employee lifecycle experience helps improve the efficiency of the process; start by:

  • Creating a feedback pipeline throughout the lifecycle to listen to employees and understand their challenges.
  • Encouraging every employee to voice their concerns and creating a feedback box or portal.
  • Training managers to focus on the solution and action for every problem. Offering managers deep visibility of organizational processes and health to achieve this.
  • Creating a culture of real-time action. While facing a challenge, action is taken in real-time to set the right example and encourage employees to voice their issues.

 


Tools for employee lifecycle management

We have discussed the importance of correctly executing every stage of the employee lifecycle. However, the best experiences and employee satisfaction are provided by suitable tools. Using the right tool at every stage supports your employee lifecycle efficiency.

Some tools to use are:

  1. Effective onboarding and recruitment tools with an employee portal to ensure a seamless transition from recruitment to onboarding and other stages. These tools help automate recruitment and onboarding tasks. For instance, sending initial onboarding collateral for better information to new employees.
  2. Integrating an employee performance tool. This should be run in collaboration with L&D programs. The employee performance tool helps gauge the initial needs of training and assessments, and L&D tools allow acting on this requirement.
  3. Utilizing a Skills Gap Analysis by Mercer | Mettl to understand your organization’s training needs. This assessment will help you identify specific skill sets for your employees, which will improve business outcomes.
  4. Employing an employee recognition tool to build a positive culture. This will help managers recognize and reward high-performing employees and boost workplace morale.
  5. Surveys to take feedback from peers for employees. This will aid appraisal cycles and maintain integrity in the process. For example, Mercer Mettl’s 360 Degree Feedback helps analyze the comprehensive performance of an employee. It takes ratings from multiple sources to gauge an employee’s working efficiency.
  6. Lastly, based on the above feedback, organizations can use Mercer | Mettl’s Leadership Development to identify potential candidates. It assesses candidates based on their ability to lead by example, innovate, increase performance, and lead the business.

 


Conclusion

Fine-tuning different stages of employee lifecycle management helps reduce turnover and recruitment costs. It improves HR’s visibility across several areas, which allows the highlighting of loopholes and challenges. Eliminating these roadblocks optimizes performance and creates an innovation-oriented environment. It will enable employees to stay satisfied in their job roles and leave the company positively, helping create a good employer brand.

 

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FAQs

How critical is the employee life cycle?

Why is managing the employee lifecycle essential for businesses?

Originally published November 28 2022, Updated October 15 2024

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About This Topic

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