Revolutionising Frontline Talent Onboarding in India: Challenges, Solutions, and Impact | Hunar.AI.

30% of frontline workers drop between hiring and joining

Biggest Reason?
Super delayed and chaotic onboarding process

Over the last one year, Hunar.AI has been building technology solutions for the frontline ecosystem. As per our estimates, for formal workforce, over 25 million frontline workers are onboarded every month in India. I want to talk about the processes & challenges involved in Onboarding Frontline Talent in India today, and impact of it on the ecosystem, and how technology can be the solution for it.

Frontline talent onboarding is a critical process that significantly impacts a company's success. Unfortunately, employers and staffing companies face various challenges during this process, resulting in delays, errors, and drop-offs. It is estimated that up to 30% of selected candidates drop off post getting selected due to onboarding challenges and delays.

In this blog, I want to discuss the challenges of onboarding frontline talent in India and discuss potential solutions to help overcome these challenges.
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Challenges in Frontline Talent Onboarding:

One Frontline talent is typically located in different work locations, and the recruitment process is decentralised. This is one of the biggest reasons why the onboarding process for the frontline workforce is inefficient today. The document collection process is completely decentralised, but verifications and onboarding remain centralised. This leads to multiple handshakes on documents before it reaches the right person, leading to errors, non-compliance, and delays in onboarding.

Onboarding Solutions for Principal Employers:

Principal employers can leverage intelligent workflows and user-friendly tools to address these challenges. On-ground hiring managers and vendors can collect and verify documents on the spot by integrating with India stack integrations. They can also utilise Natural Language Processing techniques to fill forms intelligently with data extracted from documents and release offer letters on the spot. This smart onboarding solution solves the problem of drop-off rates caused by delays and reduces onboarding costs by over 50%.

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Workforce Onboarding for Staffing and 3rd Party Payroll Companies:

For staffing companies, onboarding can be even more challenging, with hundreds of clients and thousands of sites where employees are recruited, hired, and deployed . Each employer has unique requirements, and staffing companies must ensure 100% compliance from day one.

How does it happen today?

• Recruiters source candidates and send them for interviews by employers.
• Employers confirm whether the candidate has been hired or not.
• Supervisors collect documents from candidates or request them via email or WhatsApp after the confirmation of hiring 
• Documents are further sent to the central HR team of the staffing company, either through email or a Google form.
• The central HR team deals with a backlog of employees from various sites and customers, resulting in time-consuming offer letter generation. They also send documents for verification to background verification (BGV) companies, sometimes to the vendor of the employer's choice, and waits for onboarding until the BGV vendor responds (revert time is anywhere from 24 hours to 7-10 days).
• After offer letter generation, the employee's acknowledgment is taken, and formal onboarding occurs.
• The onboarding process takes time, and the employee generally starts working without formal onboarding, which is not only wrong but also a serious breach of labour laws.

The above process in the real world is super chaotic and inefficient to say the least. The existing modus operandi leads to an increase in human resources costs by deploying hundreds of supervisors and implants on the ground. In addition to increasing onboarding costs, the drop-offs post-hiring has a massive impact on the already increasing cost of sourcing (already moved from 4-5% of annual wages to now 12-15% of annual wages).

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Overcoming Onboarding Challenges for Staffing and 3rd Party Payroll Companies: 

Implementing an optimised workflow automation system that offers configuration across clients and job roles with self-onboarding options for candidates or supervisors can substantially reduce onboarding costs. 

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This automated process enables on-the-spot document collection, and verification using India stack integrations, instant offer letter release, and custom form generation by extracting data from documents using proprietary NLP technology.

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The result?

A potential cost reduction of up 50% and a payroll ready & fully compliant employee from day one with near Zero drop-off rate between hiring and joining.
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Conclusion: Simplify Onboarding with Smart Workflow Automation

Efficient onboarding of frontline talent is crucial for employers and staffing companies. Adopting simple yet intelligent onboarding solutions can drive higher joining rates, reduce onboarding costs by more than 50%, and provide an excellent candidate experience. A smart workflow automation system can streamline the onboarding process for all employee categories, ensuring payroll-ready frontline employees from day 1, while maintaining 100% compliance

I can be reached at krishna@hunar.ai to exchange ideas on this topic and collaborate with you to solve this problem in India.