The recruitment process doesn’t end with the signing of the contract. Quite the opposite

Large-scale recruitment isn’t just about advertising and interviews. I’ve written before about how we look for staff, recruitment campaigns and recruitment in the Philippines. Today, I’d like to share the next stage of the recruitment process: pre-boarding itself. In short, the process of getting the final selected candidate into employment.

And this is precisely where I can see several potential pitfalls – for one thing, I remember this from my own experience. You hand in your notice and are already looking forward to the new job, but at the same time you’re worried – you don’t know what to expect there, what the standards and rules are in the new company, what sort of people work there, what you need to prepare… In short, they have a lot of questions, and it has happened to us more than once that a candidate has had a change of heart during their notice period and stayed with their former employer, or decided to take a job somewhere else entirely.

We’re currently experiencing quite a dramatic period of growth. We’re hiring like mad and have literally gone from 100 to 500 in 10 months. In recent weeks, it seems we’ve been taking on dozens of new employees every month. In March alone there were 32, and in the first week of April there will be another 34. That’s quite a lot of admin work, which makes it worth thinking about what can be automated, streamlined, and where we might devise a system to eliminate errors. And today I’ll describe how things stand, what we’re using, what lies ahead, and where we want to take this in the future.

In an ideal world, we want our recruitment process to be automated and personalised from start to finish. We’ve already got some parts sorted – a candidate responds to us on our website or a job portal and is automatically fed into our PlusPortál HR system (in the two years the company has been running, over 1,300 people have applied this way). They go through the selection process within the system; we are fully compliant with GDPR, and we collaborate with the hiring manager within the system. Everything is traceable, and we are able to approach candidates for other roles and so on.

We then select the final candidate and email them a link to a personalised questionnaire, again directly via Plusportál. We also include a link to a pre-boarding website, which is tailor-made for each employee from start to finish – it has a unique link with their first name and surname, and on the landing page we address them by name, as can be seen in the screenshot here:

personalised link to the pre-boarding website

A preview of the website that a new recruit sees after accepting a job offer

The website itself provides new employees with the information that newcomers are typically interested in. It’s a win-win situation – we provide the person with detailed information, they can get up to speed before they start, and at the same time they know what to expect on their first day, what to bring with them, where to park, and so on. They can, of course, also view the induction training presentations and sample employment contracts, find out about our medical check-up process, the canteen and other benefits, and they won’t be surprised to find that we all use first names here, or why that is.

Pre-boarding FAQ preview

To ensure this website isn’t just one-sided, we’ve added a touch of gamification: as you browse the site, you’ll be asked a series of questions about the topics covered here. Once you’ve answered all the questions and completed the personal questionnaire, you’ll receive a sweet treat from us on your first day at work.

gamification

example question from the website

the result upon completion of all tasks

And of course, it doesn’t end with pre-boarding and the questionnaire. The next step is signing the contract. That’s where we pulled off a real coup Tereza Škrdlová, which has set up framework contracts for individual job categories in Plusportál, so we can generate the correct contracts for all new employees with a single click. We therefore avoid manual transcription from paper questionnaires and other „monotonous tasks”, where mistakes can easily occur given the volume of new hires.

In the future, we also want to move towards electronic contract signing. Given the number of foreign nationals and our legislation, this is obviously a challenge, but we’ll start with local staff and “simple” documents. Here, of course, we’ll again have full integration with our HR system, Plusportál: I’ll generate the contract there, the system will send it straight to the employee for signing, and then save the data directly in the HR system.

I don’t like automation that’s just for show to impress head office – where a digital application is created for something that nobody actually uses anyway, and it just ends up generating another 15 pieces of paperwork that have to be printed out anyway. My aim is for us to be able to maintain a human approach to recruitment and onboarding, avoid unnecessary administrative errors and, above all, minimise the pointless paperwork that nobody wants to do.

I believe there are companies that are far ahead of us. I regard Alza as the benchmark in our industry, and everything the team there does Marek Premus I’m managing to create them. But at the same time, I know that many large companies still make their employees fill in personal questionnaires on paper and then transcribe everything manually into Word.

If you’re dealing with this issue too, we’d love to hear about your experiences.

David Havelec

HR Manager in Nobo Automotive Czech Republic

26 March 2025