When it comes to Trainual (the software), we (the team) are our own biggest fans.

We always talk about how Trainual is the best tool for your business documentation and how using our software optimizes your onboarding and streamlines your daily processes.. And we don’t just talk the talk.

We use Trainual to document everything about our business — from our company information to the employee policies that establish our culture and the processes we do all the time. You can find all our employees in our people directory, along with their responsibilities and how all our roles are connected.

Trainual helps us organize our business and keep our team on top of training. That’s how we know it can do the same for other small businesses.

But we’ll be honest: We’re playing with an advantage. We’ve been using Trainual since its literal inception, and we’ve been improving our training and documentation processes since then. And we understand that for businesses starting Trainual (or even content documentation) for the first time, it can be tough knowing where to start.

So, at our annual customer conference Insider Summit, we wanted to lift the curtain on the ways we use Trainual in our business. Our people operations manager Tara Montoya outlined how we utilize our own software to standardize the hiring and onboarding processes we have for new employees. 

👉 Want to see every session from this year’s Insider Summit? Check out the playlist here. 

Saving time by introducing ourselves to job candidates

When someone applies to a new company, they’re usually thinking about more than just their future (fingers crossed!) role. Some people are concerned about benefits; others might be thinking about where they’ll fit in the company culture. And a lot of these prospective employees might wonder if the company’s mission and values align with their own.

We’ve all been there. But while most companies leave that research to the job candidates, we actually do the work for them. We share a Trainual subject containing all our company info with candidates who’ve entered the interview stage of our hiring process. 

Why? Our candidates should have all the information they need to make the right decision for them and their families. We want to be transparent because sometimes, our candidates are looking for something a little different from what we offer. And if they decide not to move forward, that saves our team a lot of time and effort — which they can use getting the right people into the right roles.

What we share with job candidates

Here’s a list of everything we include in our introductory subject to job candidates:

• A welcome from our CEO and founder Chris Ronzio.
• An introduction to what Trainual is.
• An explanation of why we’re hiring.
• Our culture and core values.
• Our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• Our affinity groups (AKA, clubs).
• Our benefits.
• The health insurance packages we offer.
• An explanation of where our employees can live.
• How we do compensation.
• An introduction to our people team.
• An introduction to our wider leadership team.
• What onboarding looks like at Trainual.
• And additional resources.

Phew, that’s a long list! But we recognize that people will have different priorities when it comes to choosing their next company, so offering this information upfront saves us all time — especially since our team would have to answer candidates’ questions about all these topics otherwise. And we find that our new hires appreciate the transparency and preparedness.

This subject has gone to every serious job candidate we’ve had. That’s thousands of people — imagine having to answer the same benefits question over and over again, versus writing up this subject once, tweaking it every so often, and then simply sending a public share link whenever a new candidate makes it to the interview stage. Let’s call that a massive win for us.

🔥 The best part? We have a “Company Introduction for Job Candidates” template based on our own subject! That way, any business who wants to implement this practice can get a headstart on their documentation. 

Creating connection through consistency before onboarding

One of the happiest moments for our team is when we’ve found the perfect person to hire — and they’ve accepted their job offer! 

It’s a cause for celebration, but it also marks the start of a lot of hard work for our people team. It usually takes a couple of weeks before a new hire can officially start, but there’s a lot of logistics to take care of in the meantime. Plus, even if they aren’t joining us immediately, we want our newest employee to feel connected to the rest of our team as soon as possible.

That’s why our team runs through the same pre-start checklist for every new hire. It helps us establish connection early, start communication, and give new employees access to information before their start date.

And of course, this checklist is stored in our Trainual account — that way, our people team can keep themselves accountable for what they need to take care of, and they have a ready reference in case they forget certain details or need a refresher on their training.

Same checklist, consistent results

One of the ways we establish connection early is getting our internal team excited for our new hires. In our pre-start checklist, we have a task dedicated to alerting the company about our newest employee — that could happen in an all-hands meeting or on our team Slack channel.

We ask that our employees connect with the new hire on LinkedIn, so that they feel welcome right away. And because it’s included in our pre-start checklist, this happens with every single new hire. We want them all to have the same, amazing experience when they join Trainual, and having our checklist allows us to deliver the same pre-start process.

That isn’t to say that we don’t try to optimize our pre-start experience — if anything, having it documented also allows us to see where gaps emerge so we can change the process and make it better!

🔥 Implement your own pre-start experience with this “New Employee Post-offer & Pre-start Process Checklist” template — just add your company-specific details and it’s ready to share with your entire people or HR team!

Delivering onboarding that prepares and retains employees

We put a lot of time and effort into our onboarding process — we want to set our new hires up for success from the start, and it helps us retain our best employees. And the data proves it: According to Brandon Hall Group, a good onboarding experience can increase early productivity by 70% and improve retention of new hires by 82%.

That means we need to provide training materials that are both informative and easy to digest. We also do a combination of hands-on and asynchronous training — AKA, both interactive presentations and heads-down Trainual review. It prevents isolating our new hires while also saving our team the time and energy of having to watch over new employees all day.

How we answer the most important onboarding questions with Trainual

When it comes to onboarding here, we try to answer the following questions:

• Who works here?
• What does everyone do?
• How is everyone connected? How do I fit?
• What does the company do?
• What is the culture here?
• What are the rules?
• How do I do what’s expected of me?
• How do I find answers quickly?

Our people team has designed an onboarding process that covers all of these points — which involves getting into Trainual to go over training material and see where they fit in the company. Not only do they get access to our employee policy subjects, but they also can see our org chart and role chart to get an overview of how our departments are set up and how every employee is connected.

🔥 Teach your HR or people team what a successful onboarding experience looks like with our “New Employee Onboarding Process” template!

Fostering employee engagement post-onboarding

Even when onboarding is over, we continue to find ways to support our employees — no matter how long they’ve been with us. We want to retain our best people, and that means providing them with a great environment to work in.

To help us with that goal, we utilize Trainual. It isn’t just a hub for all our policies, processes, and other important company information — we also document all the fun employee engagement activities and opportunities we have at the business. We have dedicated subjects for our affinity groups and clubs, which describe what people can expect when they join — or even how they can start their own!

We also have a subject for our annual company retreat — usually, this includes details about where we’re going, what we’re planning to do there, and other logistics. Updating this subject and sharing is especially exciting because it gets our employees pumped and excited about a trip that’s coming up around the corner.

Basically, Trainual isn’t just a documentation and training tool — it becomes a great way to further engage your employees and get them invested in your company culture.

🔥 Want to create your own annual retreat cheat sheet? Use our “Company Annual Retreat Process for Employees” template as your starting point. Update it with your own unique details, and it’s ready to share with your team!

Here at Trainual, we’re invested in creating a talented and hardworking team of individuals who can bring our business to the next level. From hiring to onboarding and building a stronger company culture, we use Trainual every day to standardize and streamline our processes — making our team building so much easier. 

And while we may be Trainual experts, we’re not here to gatekeep our methods — we want to share our tips for using Trainual to all our customers. Because we want to help business leaders build teams like ours — with people who care about each other and want to build a successful business together.