Fox Entertainment Group: An Onboarding Success Story

Fox Entertainment Group – home to 20th Century Fox Film Studio, MySpace, Fox Broadcasting and more – is an exciting place to work. But for new-hires, paper-based, manual onboarding was not an exciting process. In order to effectively engage and retain employees in their competitive marketplace, Fox focused on transforming the new-hire experience to reflect its entertaining and dynamic environment. The following is a transcript of a presentation given by Cindy McKenzie, SVP IT, Fox Entertainment, on October 14, 2009.

Attracting and Retaining Top Talent by Capitalizing on Being a Top Brand. In 2006, Deloitte was contracted by Fox Entertainment Group to provide talent management research for Fox.

Findings included:

• Competition for top talent will become fiercer.
• Fox’s current "employment brand" may be undermining its attempts to attract top performers.
• Fox’s ability to attract and retain talent may impact the company’s ability to sustain profitable growth.

Deloitte recommended that the onboarding process should increase the new hire’s excitement about joining the Fox team, and should be easy, fun and informative.

From this recommendation, Fox formed a Recruiting and Retention Task Force, with initiatives including a corporate portal redesign and re-launch that would reflect Fox’s revitalized branding, and capitalize on Fox as a media company.

A New Portal for New Hires to Reflect the Excitement of Working at Fox

To be world-class, this new-hire portal would accommodate approximately 2,500 new-hires per year at 5 companies in 36 locations and would:

• Allow new hires to take a virtual tour of Fox’s benefits, services and policies, as well as complete their new hire paperwork before their first day of work.
• Automatically notify the hiring or line manager to provision new hires with the assets they need, so Day one can be more effective.
• Provide a robust online experience, including a revamped employee orientation with speakers, film and TV clips and a lot tour (for on-lot employees).
• Reflect the excitement of working for Fox.

In addition, all new hire forms, policies, training and descriptions of services would be online, searchable and personalized. Portal will indicate: Portal will indicate:

• Your name
• Your company
• Your job
• Your benefits eligibility
• Your company location

And only show you those items that pertain to you.

[eventPDF]

In addition, the product features would have to include the ability to:

• Match Fox’s portal look and feel, and branding
• Support video content support
• Filter content by entity and location
• Allow vendor support for uploading content
• Integrate to a number of systems

Choosing the Best Solution

AnswerSource Onboarding met all these requirements with a mature product offering. Enwisen’s AnswerSource Onboarding is at the heart of Fox’s new-hire experience, and integrated with Provisioning, Recruiting, Benefits Administration and PeopleSoft and other HR systems for a consistent, robust online experience.

Results to Date: Over 90 Percent Rate the Experience as "Good to Very Good"

To get feedback on how they’re doing, all new hires receive a Welcome Letter on Day one, with a link to a survey on their Onboarding experience. The feedback has been very positive, with over 90 percent of respondents rating the experience and the system as "good to very good," with comments like, "this was a wonderful way to see the company and as a newcomer I felt welcomed."

And lessons learned?

• Detailed requirements and an RFP a must.
• Do as much upfront work as possible collecting, consolidating and updating documents and forms before the project begins
• Get Legal involved in use of eSignatures
• Do not underestimate the testing effort - test on Macs, PCs, and applicable browsers since onboarding will be accessed through personal devices.
• Survey new hires to get feedback on site usability and identify any issues quickly