I’ve spent time with enough people (Brock Fisher, Hannah Gill, Chris Hanley to name just a few) in the real estate industry to know that properly onboarding new hires is not just a nice to have; really, it’s a must-do if you want that employee to stick with you for the long haul.

If you’re more of a numbers person, here are some stats of a general nature that back up the above hypothesis:

1. A survey conducted by TeamStage found that only 12% of employees feel that their company provides a good onboarding program

2. 70% of employees who liked and excelled at their jobs had a streamlined onboarding experience. 

3. A good onboarding experience improves long-term job satisfaction by more than 2.6 times.

In my research, I stumbled across another survey that mentioned that HR managers believed their onboarding process was limited by time and lack of appropriate technology.

Could ChatGPT be of help in this scenario?

Prompt of the day

So, I tried to smash out a generic prompt to create an onboarding plan for a new hire:

Please act as an experienced human resources manager with over 20 years of experience helping new hires onboard successfully into their roles as quickly as possible - and help me generate a 30-60-90 day onboarding plan for a [Role Type] in the [Industry] sector, working in a [Type of Business: Small Team/Large Corporation/Startup/etc.]. The onboarding plan should incorporate the cultural values of [enter cultural goals] and be created using the SMART framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.

You will change the bits in square brackets to suit your situation:

Please act as an experienced human resources manager with over 20 years of experience helping new hires onboard successfully into their roles as quickly as possible - and help me generate a 30-60-90 day onboarding plan for a Property Manager in the real estate industry, working in a small business. The onboarding plan should incorporate the cultural values of inclusion, collaboration, enthusiasm and accountability and be created using the SMART framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.

The output of this prompt isn’t entirely awful… but I don’t love it!

Here’s an excerpt:

What’s missing? 

Probably a lot of things as I’m no HR expert, but what stands out to me is the pre-work, ie an employee’s onboarding does not begin the day they start!

Brock Fisher's concept of crafting exceptional experiences upfront for new employees immediately jumps to mind but this approach will require some proactive planning.

So, it seems to me like a good idea for a follow-up prompt (note I’ve got ChatGPT 4 with browsing turned on):

Now could you please revise this plan, but include to-do's for me as a manager in the leadup to the new starter's commencement date. I want to mirror some of the excellent ideas in this article in my onboarding process https://eliteagent.com/all-onboard-brock-fisher-on-how-a-great-onboarding-experience-can-set-you-up-for-success/

This gives me a basic action list from Brock’s article, which is pretty cool - (and note because we are continuing the previous conversation, the SMART framework remains constant… )

But I’ll tell ya what I want, what I really, really want… is for the two lists to be combined as a project plan or a checklist, so I’m going to go with one final follow-up prompt:

My new hire starts on the 31st of October, could you please create me a project plan with dates, deliverables and responsibilities, I can use with Notion or Microsoft project?

You can see my final result here.

I still don’t think it’s perfect - for example, ChatGPT has allocated responsibility to the new hire for attending a workshop on company values. (I disagree; things like that are the leaders’ or the existing team’s responsibility!)

I guess the conclusion to this one is this: If you don’t have a formal onboarding process, ChatGPT (alongside Brock Fisher) can give you some building blocks for what ‘good’ might look like in the future - as opposed to starting from scratch with a blank sheet of paper.

And if we kept going, we might actually get close.

Happy Hunting 🚀