Onboarding: Key to perception of the company as a great place to work

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyse onboarding practices, in order to test their role in generating a perception of the company as a Great Place to Work (GPTW) and to identify which ones contribute most to this perception. The experience of newcomers during the onboarding process is assessed using a questionnaire based on the 30 onboarding practices of Klein, Polin and Soutton (2015) and the criteria used by GPTW. The sample consisted of 194 university students in their final year in internship programs with companies. We applied descriptive, cluster and correlation analysis. A large part of applied and valued onboarding practices are those where personal support is perceived at different levels of hierarchy, knowledge and roles. Guidance and information practices have the greatest influence on the perception of the company as a GPTW. We demonstrate the existence of a positive relationship between the evaluation of onboarding and GPTW. This research expands the knowledge about onboarding and analyses it from a novel perspective: its relationship with the perception of the company as a GPTW.