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Want to attract, enable and retain top talent in your organization?  Most organizations provide new employees with some form of static welcome / quick-start material.  Some of the more innovative organizations even offer wikis that support a new hire's on-boarding processes.  Why stop there?

Here are 5 simple enablement tips that make the most of social technologies to reduce the time to value for any new employee.

1. Ditch Hyperlinks, use Profiles - If new hires are being handed a Word document or sent an email with a list of contacts to assist them in the onboarding process, an organization is missing an opportunity to create more personal connections. Large organizations can seem overwhelming - to combat this, stop using lists and links of resources and start presenting users with profiles of their key contacts and peers.  New hires entering your organization will fully expect that you have infrastructure in place to support the social networking activity that they are used to in their personal lives.  They are self starters and will not hesitate to connect with peers and colleagues through online networks.
2. Role Specific Wikis - Business frequently changes and knowledge about particular business functions should not be kept within documents, but exposed as living, breathing documents that are able to be easily surfaced in the context of a onboarding dashboard based on a user's role.  Normally documents provided for onboarding are created by groups of people abstracted from the actual process of being a new hire.  As new hires work through steps to enter the organization they can comment and provide critical feedback on the document to enhance subsequent user's experiences.
3. Discussions on Telecom / Shared Services - As above, this knowledge should be presented in a format that is searchable and able to be discussed.  Chances are that someone has faced the same challenges as others and can reply to a question from another new hire with a solution.  It would be interesting if an employee providing a "correct" or helpful answer could be rewarded by the organization.
4. Tip / Tricks from the Community - Why not allow new hires and long time employees to contribute tips to help others through the process?  There is a lot of tacit knowledge around the ins and outs of being successful in a new role.  This information is invaluable.
5. Track Search Terms and  Refine - As new hires search for information, search terms should be saved and analyzed.  This will help to illustrate any large gaps in material that they are attempting to locate as they get started within the company.  A small improvement can result in a big time and cost savings for the organization.

The return on a creating a more focused user experience for new hires equates to hard, bottom line, cost savings.  Hopefully the tips above will provide your organization with a good starting point to leverage tools you may have today to improve new employee experiences.