"Symba helped cut down on the amount of emails and communications sent manually, kept info and resources in one place, and kept candidates engaged during onboarding."
The Challenges
Difficulty Keeping New Hires Engaged During Pre-Onboarding
This Fortune 500 energy company was bringing on a new hire cohort of 60+ interns. With offers extended months in advance, they needed an effective keep warm strategy to engage their new hire interns prior to Day One and reduce the likelihood of reneges.
Like most companies, they restrict access to corporate systems until the actual start date, so their early talent team was relying on emails, which often get lost or buried in inboxes, to share resources and drum up excitement.
Manual and Time-Consuming Onboarding Processes
Because emails were the main form of communication, the preboarding and onboarding processes were very manual, resulting in repetitive back-and-forth exchanges with their new hire interns. From start to finish, onboarding took the team 6-8 weeks, kicking off at the beginning of March.
The Solution
To solve their preboarding and onboarding challenges, the early careers team turned to Symba. They were able to get up and running, and customize their platform to their needs very quickly. A step up from previous years, the incoming intern class now had access to a one-stop shop platform prior to their start dates where they could meet the rest of their cohort, get a calendar of upcoming events, and access all their resources.
The early careers team also leveraged Symba’s Journeys feature, which are custom automated workflows with steps like emails, pop-ups, and more, to streamline communication and drive engagement. This freed up their time to focus on prepping for a best-in-class internship experience rather than emails.
Candidate Feedback
Their return interns shared that their onboarding experience with Symba went very smoothly and they appreciated having all their resources in one place compared to the previous year. They said that Symba is an easy, user-friendly platform and liked that their email inboxes were now less cluttered.
The Results
After implementing Symba, the early careers team was able to reduce time-to-onboard by up to 50% from 6-8 weeks to 4 weeks. The Welcome Journey they implemented engaged 94% of their interns, and 82% of the interns engaged with every step of the Journey (all emails, pop-ups, etc). The automated emails had on average a 92.5% open rate and a 35% click through rate (CTR), compared to internal email communication benchmarks (68% average open rate and 8% CTR).
Additionally, the team found Symba’s Customer Success team to be a critical partner, providing support where needed as well as regular check-ins, which uncovered strategies that weren’t top of mind before.
"I would definitely recommend Symba to other programs." - Early Career Consultant
