Make the Most of New Hire Trial Periods
Well-planned trial periods for new hires are an essential element of a successful business. Trial periods can be a great method of ensuring that an employee is a good fit for your organization. By carefully planning trial periods, employers can quickly integrate new employees while simultaneously assessing their ability to effectively integrate at the team level and with the company as a whole.
Eight members of the Young Entrepreneur Council recently shared their top tips for designing effective trial periods. These experts provide key experience-based insights that target the essential elements of well-crafted trial and training periods. Designing trial periods around these suggestions can ensure that your organization quickly and effectively integrates new hires.
- Utilize a 30-60-90 day plan.
This helps to clarify company expectations to a new hire. As part of this, you should provide easy-to-follow metrics such as daily tasks, performance indicators, and expected results. A 30-60-90 day plan incentivizes new hires to quickly integrate while simultaneously ensuring that your company hired someone who is a good fit for his or her role.
- Make sure a new hire fits well into your company culture.
You should provide new hires with regular opportunities to participate in company culture. This should be done as early as possible so as to ensure that new hires understand company culture and have a good sense of how the company and its goals. Employees who are a good fit with company culture have an improved sense of trust and engagement with the organization. They are also more likely to stay with the company, which has a profoundly positive fact on an organization’s bottom line.
- Ensure that new hires can easily access key organizational information.
A key suggestion from expert Derek Robinson is to, “Consider creating a well-organized knowledge base that simplifies how new hires look for information. This ensures that you do not end up bombarding all recruits with information they may or may not need to use.” By providing information in an easy-to-access manner, you will empower new hires with the tools and resources they need to succeed within your organization.
- Use interviews as an opportunity to begin the onboarding process.
Employee turnover is a high expense for a business to take on – this expense is exacerbated when new hires leave an organization early on in their employment. In order to help mitigate these costs, consider treating interviews as an opportunity to begin onboarding. You can do this by ensuring that job descriptions are thorough and accurate. Prior to an interview, provide the candidate with key documents and a description of company values. This will give candidates realistic expectations about their role within the company, which is key to reducing incidents of turnover.
- Partner new hires with experienced employees.
Partnering a new hire with an employee provides the new hire with a chance to explore the company and his or her new role. Shadowing allows new hires to ask questions and quickly integrate into company culture. You’ll also have great opportunities to assess new hire progress by regularly meeting with the employee being shadowed to discuss how the new hire is doing.
Instituting effective trial periods is a great method for encouraging a healthy employee/employer relationship with new hires. A key first step is to assess your organization and the unique needs of your new hires – and then use the above ideas to design a trial period that meets those needs so as to best transition new employees into your organization.
About the Author
Justin Goodman has spent the past 20 years in insurance. He is the co-founder and CEO of Total CSR and co-founder and Managing Director of Project 55. By the age of 29, he was recognized as one of the top five construction insurance experts nationwide by Risk and Insurance Magazine. He also was named to Insurance Business Magazine’s Hot 100 and most recently the 2024 Insurance Journal Agent of the Year. Justin has trained over 50,000 CSR’s, account managers and producers through his work at Total CSR. He has a passion for developing the next generation of insurance professionals. When not with his family, he devotes his free time to speaking engagements and advising agency owners across the country.
