Transforming Employee Onboarding with Modern Learning Strategies

00:00-Introduction

Nolan: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Learning and Development podcast sponsored by Infopro Learning. As always, I’m your host, Nolan Hout. A special guest, Cori Power, the Education Director of BDO, is joining me on the podcast today. With over 20 years of experience in HR and learning and development, Cori has really done it all.

Today, we will be talking about all things onboarding, from strategies to measurement and everything in between. Without further ado, let’s meet our guest. Cori, welcome to the podcast.

Cori: Hi, Nolan. It’s great to be here.

00:33-Cori’s Journey & Core Values of Onboarding

Nolan: We will dig into the topic of employee onboarding with modern learning strategies, which are especially relevant right now. Lots of companies are seeing big waves of offboarding and onboarding. Obviously, the latter is more fun, but it creates unique challenges, especially in our remote-hybrid world. So happy to dive into that. But before we do, Cori, I want to start by learning more about you. Your journey to where you are now at BDO, managing training programs for the Alliance firm. But you didn’t start there. I’d love to hear your origin story.

Cori: Yeah, yeah. If we go way back, I kind of fell into HR accidentally. I was interested in psychology in college, so I took an I/O psych class and thought, “This is cool — it combines things I like.” So, I ended up in HR. For about 18 months, it was trial by fire. I worked for a call center — a collection agency — in HR. It was a lot, around 900 employees. One month, we had about 90 terminations -10 % of the workforce. I thought, “I don’t want to be here.” The company was great, but that environment. So, I ended up interviewing at a CPA firm, and here’s my funny story about that: I didn’t know what a CPA was. I had to Google it before I went to the interview. So, I was like, okay, I know now that it’s, you know, it’s a certified public accountant.

Nolan: That’s the first test. That was my first question. Do you know what a CPA is?

Cori: And I worked at that firm for about 15 years. I was their first HR person. When I started, we had about 70 employees. By the time I left, we were closer to 500. So, there was a huge amount of growth. My team went from just me to five people. I sat in that HR seat for a long time. Eventually, I moved into a training and development role because that’s where I felt the most passion. In HR, we made a lot of onboarding changes for new hires. I like to speak on this topic because it’s so impactful when you’re bringing someone on board. It affects retention, engagement—the initial branding they get of your firm.

03:11–Building a Collaborative Onboarding Structure

Nolan: I’m going to run off script because a different question came to mind—and you’re uniquely positioned to answer it, Cori. It’s connected to onboarding, I swear. A lot of organizations are now viewing talent through a skills-based lens. You must have seen this when you were the sole HR person.

Many people—I’m sure many listening—are in smaller organizations where they’re handling onboarding, benefits, and everything else. You’re doing a bit of everything. What I’ve found is that those organizations tend to grow based on the person’s focus. If they’re into benefits and payroll, they get good at that, and talent often takes a back seat.

Long story short, you’re in a large organization, obviously, at the BDO, a very large organization. There, there’s a more fragmented, I say fragmented, not that they are, but HR has its silo or whatever, its shop, the organization, and then learning has its organization. Sometimes, those are seen as disconnected, not one. Even if they are connected, it almost seems like a dotted line, which is important for onboarding. Because if we’re not recruiting, based on the, let’s assume we’re a skills-based organization.

We’ve defined a good salesperson has these skills, if that’s not evidenced in the recruitment process. We’re not finding people with those skills, and then if in the onboarding stage, we’re not tying to those skills that we thought were so important in reinforcing those, there’s a big disconnect. Before we get into what actually should live in that onboarding, my first question is how do you partner when you don’t have the benefit of owning it all, which is a blessing and a curse.

How do you partner with, maybe, an apartment that you’re not reporting into and they’re not reporting to you to say, okay, when we look at this onboarding journey, it’s not just about what happens day one; it actually starts day negative 10 when they get recruited. Can you talk briefly about how you ensure that’s all connected?

Cori: Yeah, you have to be super collaborative. If you have that environment, you can get everyone in the same room and talk at a high level about the plan. You’ve got recruiters, learning and development folks, HR, and probably some subject matter experts in the room, so they can discuss the skills you need.

I don’t know specifically, but I believe that’s how BDO runs things—it’s very much like everyone knows everything, and they make sure it all fits together well. You need all those pieces working together because, like you said, otherwise, it feels disconnected. You might bring in the wrong people, or they might not get the right training based on their experience and skills. It’s super important. That strategy and process have to be built collaboratively. You can’t just do it piece by piece.

6:17–Personalizing the Onboarding Experience

Nolan: Yeah, let’s speak more about this since we’re already discussing the structure. What is that structure? So, we want to build an onboarding journey. We want to build a better onboarding experience. Where do we start?

Cori: I think you nailed it—day negative 10. When you’re going through the recruiting process as a candidate, you’re already deciding whether you want to be part of the organization based on that experience. That’s already onboarding.

Then, once you’re hired, it starts right away. What does the offer letter look like? What communication is coming out? What’s the essential information I need for day one? What are the expectations?

Once you’re on board, it’s about that comprehensive piece: information about the company, policies, benefits, and key systems. Then, it moves into role-specific training. When I think about onboarding, I use the analogy of building a house. You start with a solid foundation—knowing the organization and what to expect. Then you build the structure. By the end, you’re adding finishing touches—like figuring out who to contact for what.

You have to start early. For the candidate, the experience begins right away. It’s like walking into a store for the first time, noticing everything, and forming opinions immediately. Then, you take in the details over time. That’s how I see it. Did I answer the question?

7:59-Leveraging Technology in Onboarding

Nolan: One of the things I find fascinating—I’m rewatching Breaking Bad on Netflix right now. Great show. If you missed it, it’s on Netflix—go watch it. Anyway, it’ll probably suggest something similar when I finish, like Better Call Saul. It’ll say, Hey, you liked this? Go watch Better Call Saul. But it’s not going to say, “You liked that? Go watch Love Island UK or Love is Blind—which is also on Netflix. I watch Love Island, and it’s great. Terrible but great. Don’t judge me.

So it recommends things for me. In onboarding, it’s kind of the same idea—you want to create that “on a roll” experience. The onboarding at BDO might be like a generic show, something with mass appeal like The Great British Baking Show. But then you need to guide people based on their role and the skills needed for it. That’s what makes L&D one of the hardest jobs in the world.

It’s not like marketing, where you can target a 35-year-old male who needs shaving cream. You have to make something that works for the male, the female, the older person, the younger one—everyone. So how do you personalize onboarding enough that someone thinks, “Okay, now I’m getting content relevant to sales or finance”?

You’re not in sales. You’re not in every department. So how do you bring in that knowledge to create a more personalized experience?

Cori: It’s such a good question, and I’m going to approach it from a two-stand approach. I think if you have the ability—we’re going to talk about that digital onboarding piece—use it. That’s where you can get into more personalized learning. It’s using AI technology: you watch this, maybe you should watch that. You’re building a learning plan based on what they’re onboarding for, their experience level, and then slotting in courses or onboarding videos accordingly.

If you don’t have that ability—not every firm does—you must start basic and modify from there. A highly experienced person versus someone new to college will need very different onboarding. You’ll have the basics: here’s the firm, the benefits, key systems. Then you’d likely pass them to their team sooner than a new hire. You hand them off to their manager or mentor and say, they’ve got the basics, they’re ready to go.

For a new hire, it’s different. They’ve got the basics, but now you build on that: teach the software, how things are done—say they’re a tax person—how we do 1040s, business returns, what that looks like. The fun stuff. They may go to their team later once they have a better foundation. You have to structure it. And if you can use digital tools or AI, do it. It’ll save so much time.

Nolan: We used what we developed for many clients—an onboarding survey with role-dependent questions. We worked with them to create this. It wasn’t even using AI—well, not in a complicated way. We said, “OK, let’s develop a question bank based on the role and how familiar they are with the company and the job we want them to do.”

Depending on how they answer, we’ll show them one of ten steps in the onboarding journey. We might start them at step one or step nine. They could self-select, and the benefit was that they understood the logic—take a quiz, see relevant questions. It gave them a sense of control over their learning. That’s key because no one wants to be taught—they want to learn but not be taught. That’s important.

12:35-Balancing Digital and Personal Onboarding

Nolan: One thing you mentioned about digital—I wanted to touch on that. You’ve seen the shift, I’m sure. I’ve onboarded people I didn’t meet until months later. For example, I onboarded someone two weeks ago, and I won’t meet him for another three weeks—if I’m lucky. Sometimes, it’s been four months.

How do you balance that? Digital is great—you can do cool things like surveys—but you still want a personal connection when you walk into a company. There’s a cost to that, of course. So how do you strike the balance? Make it digital and autonomous to keep onboarding costs down—especially at a call center onboarding 30 people a month—but still keep engagement high and make people feel not just onboarded but welcome.

Cori: Yeah, I actually am. I work remotely. None of my team members live near me—I’m in Iowa and think the closest person is in Minneapolis. Everything I’ve done from day one has been digital. I onboarded, met briefly with HR, watched an orientation, and started training.

14:54-Creative Engagement Strategies in Remote Onboarding

Cori: In terms of personalization, the big thing for me was that everything was ready. They sent me a laptop with a nice note. I met with my manager right away. It wasn’t just HR stuff—I was already getting into BDO culture, not just the Alliance team culture. I was meeting people and had calls lined up on my calendar, which was nice. It felt like they were already thinking about including me before I started.

You can do that from a cultural standpoint. One of the things—it’s silly, right? But the merch is kind of nice. I got a BDO laptop carrier and a backpack. You kind of feel like, okay, I’m here. You really can merge those two. It also depends on where you’re located and how you want to create your experience, but I’ve also seen firms that have done a DoorDash. What’s your favorite beverage that you like to start your morning with? And they’ll DoorDash your favorite. Or like, let’s have lunch together and they’ll door dash your lunch and you can sit down with your team or manager. So, it still feels very one-on-one in a way. But even if you’re not in the same location or you’re not walking into a building on your day one.

Nolan: I like that—like DoorDash—send us your drink order or whatever it is. There’s something even if you can’t personalize their learning path or meet them in person. I mean, there’s something unique to my drink order, right? Are you a black coffee person or an 18-shots-of-caramel-mocha person? Honestly, that probably tells you a lot. The manager probably knows more about them than what’s on the resume. The person who requests booze probably needs to get a little flag—maybe even be put into the sales department.

Cori: My daughter is at the barista, and she tells me all about the people that come in and what they order, and she’s like, I can learn a lot about a person by their order.

Nolan: Yeah, I bet. And you know, I have to give a small— I promise there’s no benefit; I don’t even own stock in their company— but Starbucks has shifted many of their policies to promote more of an in-person coffee experience. Absolutely love it. So, I don’t know why I’m even plugging it. If you haven’t been to service recently, it’s kind of a cool environment now. You can get your drink in a mug, with unlimited refills. It’s a great thing.

So, I was thinking about the DoorDash thing and some of the merch you mentioned. This is where some people have missed the boat when building out their onboarding programs. Everybody has moved to digital technology as a way to save costs.

I think it should have been: we have a thousand dollars to onboard an employee— or whatever it is, three hundred, two hundred— say I have a hundred bucks to onboard someone. How do we want to spend that money?

Okay, well, 20 bucks has to go toward admin fees to spin up systems— and I know it’s more, just bear with me— but then maybe 80 bucks, or 80%, goes to the actual time. Just walking this person through the HR stuff. They’re going to listen because they’re on the call, but they’re not necessarily going to do anything about it.

Do you need to walk somebody through the ADP portal, or can you just tell them where it is? More than likely, they will only need it come tax season— like when applying for a loan or doing taxes. You don’t need to spend onboarding time on ADP.

So, I like to look at it this way: Take the same budget. Don’t look at digitizing or automating onboarding to cut costs— you can— but think of how to use that money to make it more engaging. And I know that’s a big point for you, Cori— what do you get from having a more engaged employee? What is that investment?

18:09–Measuring the Success of Onboarding Programs

Nolan: You mentioned it made you feel good, but aside from that, what are some of the metrics you track that show the value of a good onboarding experience? How do we know we’ve done our job well?

Cori: Right. Well, retention is definitely one of them. You look at the end of the year and how many of your new hires have stayed. That’s going to be key. You can look at your engagement. If you do any engagement surveys, you can look at that. You can see how your new hires are—if they’re engaged. You can truly look at those cuts and see. I think that’s really big.

Nolan: Absolutely.

Cori: From a team perspective, what teams are killing it? What are the ones that have high retention? What are the ones that have high engagement and going to those teams and saying, what are you doing? Why do you have such a great team? Those are big ones. With others, you could not just look at the engagement and the retention but also look at production, what’s coming out of those teams. And how quickly are you able to get somebody onboarded?

Nolan: Competency. Very important, very important metric.

Cori: And a great onboarding process does that. It helps with feeling part of the culture, like I mentioned, and gives you a better understanding of your role, position, and expectations. It’s a confidence boost, right? You feel like you know more, so you can contribute to conversations and become a help.

The team becomes more innovative because every time you bring on a new person, they offer a new perspective and add diversity of thought. It leads to faster time to productivity. They’re getting things done and have the knowledge and skills to make an impact—on the team, the client, or wherever it matters.

Nolan: Yeah. I think what I’ve found, with many people I’ve had on the podcast and some of the projects we’ve worked on, is that things go best when you’ve thought about this before making the investment. So much of it is unique to what you’re trying to accomplish, right? Not everyone has the same onboarding experience. Onboarding your CEO will be very different from onboarding a customer service rep you plan to keep for 18 months and promote. You have to stop and ask: What are we going 3to measure?

One piece of advice I got from a client—USA Today—we were building out their onboarding program, and he said, “People care about the numbers when you put dollar signs in front of them.” So, attrition in the first 90 days is a key stat—what happens in the first 90, then 180, then 360. We usually look at those for attrition or retention. But if you start attaching cost to those numbers—actual cost, not just cost savings—it changes the conversation. Like, “Every time we lose an employee at this level, it costs us this much to replace them. Here’s how much we lost last year due to poor onboarding.”

No one wants to say that because the person who built the onboarding is often at the table. But it’s rarely just the onboarding itself—the team culture. Maybe they met the team in the beginning and got a different pitch. We were showing them Netflix, Great British Bake Off, fluff articles. Then they joined the team, and suddenly it’s Sons of Anarchy.

Putting real dollar values to this matter. Like, “Last year, our attrition cost $300,000. This year, $100,000. We saved $200K by investing $50K or $2,000 on branded backpacks.” That’s where I see the most success—not just percentages or metrics but tying it back to real dollars.

Don’t challenge my $100,000 onboarding revamp when we’re spending that much replacing five people at the Alaska center. So yeah, from what I understand, at BDO, a big part of what you’ve been doing is building these onboarding programs and integrating employees.

22:55-Lessons Learned in Onboarding Processes

Nolan: What are some lessons learned? Other people listening are in the same spot. We’ve discussed syncing with HR, upstream and downstream, tying it to revenue or metrics, and using digital tools to track progress. What else have you learned? If someone’s starting an onboarding program today, what worked for you at BDO that might help them?

Cori: And I can’t speak to BDO specifically. I don’t sit on that team. I speak to the Alliance, though. Anytime we have a new Alliance firm on board, they undergo an onboarding process. It’s very similar. The biggest lesson I’ve learned—and it’s the same for a new employee or firm—is the sheer amount of knowledge that person is trying to absorb quickly.

So, how can you use a drip campaign so they’re not overwhelmed and can apply the knowledge you’re sharing? For me, the key is spacing it out. What do they need to know immediately? What can wait? You just go down the line. Thinking in terms of spacing rather than dumping everything at once helps them absorb and retain the information.

Nolan: I just onboarded a person, and in the first week, we flew their counterpart—who lives in India—to Boston so they could sit next to each other and meet for the week. They created all kinds of documents: this is what I should do, blah, blah, blah.

Two or three weeks later, I get an email from the person saying, “Hey, I’m completely out of the loop. I don’t know what’s going on with this specific project. We haven’t talked about it. Nobody’s let me know.” I paused—well, that’s interesting. I pull up the onboarding document and say, “Here’s when we talked about it,” and she goes, “My gosh, I completely forgot we even had that conversation.”

So yeah, it’s real. Sometimes, you need to say it, say it again, and say it again. Don’t try to pack everything in right away. Know they’ll forget a lot of it. So, give them the info, get them meeting their team and boss, get them working—let them see it as a journey, not just two weeks of onboarding. It’s not “once it’s done, I close the book, someone else’s problem.”

One thing I want to touch on, Cori, which is important, is that you onboard and help onboard the Alliance members of BDO, which is a partner network. BDO has its internal staff, but also many alliance firms—Infopro Learning happens to be one of them, and many others.

25:57-Differences in Onboarding Employees vs. Partners

Nolan: So, you’re onboarding a unique set of individuals who aren’t internal employees. But you’ve done both, right? At that other CPA firm, you onboarded employees directly into the company. Can you talk a bit about the differences between the two? That’s really fascinating.

Cori: I think the big thing is, well, I can almost speak more to the similarities and the differences.

Nolan: Yeah, well then let’s talk about those.

Cori: For me, the biggest key was creating that relationship with them and helping them understand you’re a resource. They can come to you with questions—whether you’re working with a client or an employee. As an HR person, your clients are your internal team members, right? It’s like, hey, you can come to us with anything. We’re going to go through a lot, and you’ll probably remember about half of it. I always tell them upfront: You’ll want to come back in a few weeks and say, “I think you mentioned this—can you explain it again?” I let them know we’re here.

Please don’t ever feel like you should have remembered everything or be uncomfortable asking questions. I also mentioned spacing things out—that’s really important. Maybe the biggest difference is when you onboard a new team member, you usually pass them off unless they’re on your team. As an HR person, you give them everything from your perspective and then move on. We don’t do that. We get to keep those relationships, which is fun. You start to build them. It’s always cool when a new firm starts and you see them begin to use the resources and see the value in the Alliance. The same is true for a new hire—they start to use and see things, too.

Nolan: As you were talking about it, I was thinking—that’s the big difference. When you onboard us, for example, we can come to you at any point, and we feel like we should if we have any questions. But when you and the L&D or HR team onboard a colleague, their questions go to their reporting manager. It’s, again, a double-sided sword.

The value, in your case, Cori—where you sit today—is that you get to own the experience. You don’t have to rely on someone else not dropping the ball. You deliver that unified experience. But when you’re onboarding employees, there’s an end date—maybe a year long, whatever it is—but there’s a finite window where you get to say: “Okay, now spread your wings and fly.” And that can either be a nice moment or feel like, “Now you’re someone else’s problem,” depending on your type of person.

I do wonder—would it be better to stay connected? Like, “Hey, now that I’ve onboarded you through HR, I’m still your person. Whether you need me now or in two years, if you have a problem with your manager, boss, or client, I’m here. Anytime you reach out, I’ll get you sorted. Don’t worry about it. I wonder what the impact would be. That would be very labor-intensive.

Cori: But that’s the idea of an HR business partner within an organization. If we have 12,000 employees across many departments, we still have one person in HR to go to. I know if I need HR, I’m calling Rachel—she’s my person. That makes a huge difference because she knows the Alliance, our team, and the context of where we’re coming from.

That matters in a larger organization. If you’re smaller, you have the benefit—when I was in that role, we had 120 employees. I knew everyone; I knew their kids. So, it’s a little different. However, in a larger organization, that connection makes a big difference.

30:08-Leveraging Technology for Enhanced Onboarding

Nolan: One of the pushbacks I’ve heard is, how do we have the people, the bandwidth, the time? For those, I’d really encourage— we talked about this at the beginning— that if you leverage technology, most people have the same question. It’s the 80-20 rule. If you can find a way through a bot, AI, FAQs, or a video link. If you’re an HR business partner thinking, “I have one HR partner for 1,000 people—how do they even do their job?”—well, 80% will be the same. If you can route those requests to an automated solution, it allows for more human interaction where it matters.

Tying it back to onboarding, the same principle applies: what can we automate that should be automated so we can deliver a personalized experience when employees need it? They don’t need me to walk them through ADP, nor do I want to. Interesting to reflect on that.

Cori: Sorry, quickly on that. I was just going to say that’s one thing that I think BDO has done a great job of. So, when I started, they had it like a bot, and his name was Bart, and it was very kind of fun. You could ask Bart questions about your new hire experience, and they’ve now shifted a bit over to it’s more like a ChatGPT. Still, we have our own internal chat, BDO, but it’s called Horizon and has a persona that answers things specific to policies and procedures. So, it does take the onus off that HR business partner.

Nolan: That’s phenomenal. I love solutions like that. It’s that Human+ AI world. It’s not the other; it’s the synergy between the two, and that’s really what people are seeing as the value.

Outro–31:51

Nolan: Well, thank you so much, Cori. We’ve covered a lot today. I appreciate you sharing your knowledge with everybody. Cori Power, C-O-R-I, then Power, she’s on LinkedIn, please do, she loves to help out others. Follow her there; obviously, we’ll get our information as well. Any final remarks, Cori, before we sign off for the day?

Cori: The only words of wisdom I have to say is, make sure you keep onboarding your employees. Don’t just stop at that end mark. Keep onboarding them, and ensure they know you care about them. We used to say this in our old organization—you date your new hires through the recruiting process, and then you stop dating them, and they’re like… So you’re kind of letting them down. I know “dating” isn’t the right word professionally, but make sure they know you care about them and their value.

Nolan: Love that. I’m telling you—that door, I think you know, it’s not that hard. Put an alert in the system once a quarter, have somebody message them: ‘What’s your drink order?’ Drinks are on video today. We’ll DoorDash something. What a cool thing to do. Wonderful advice, Cori. Thank you so much. We’ll have to do this again sometime soon. Thank you

Cori: Definitely. Thank you, Nolan.