Bacardi: An upgraded global employee onboarding experience

The need for change

Bacardi used to have a traditional e-learning approach to employee onboarding that was too complicated and expensive to update regularly to meet their evolving people and business needs. They were looking for something that would provide that flexibility, reduce time and money spent on updating HR content for new joiners as the company evolves, would add an element of interactivity, and would be delivered to new employees before they start at the office on Day 1.

Before partnering with Talentech, the process was inefficient and often ineffective - a new hire would sign a contract, then “everybody did their own local thing” which varied at each location and depended on the local line managers’ initiative and commitment to employee onboarding.

Data-backed decisions

Basing their future strategy on data collected via the Talentech app, Bacardi is now confident in the onboarding choices they are making.

With overwhelmingly positive pulse check results, the future focus is to align offline and digital onboarding experiences. For example, the onboarding app gives every new hire contact details for a Bacardi ‘buddy’ they can go to for advice and guidance, but whether the onboardee and the buddy connect in real life is of course up to the individual employees. The goal now is to make sure this and other online milestones start further corresponding with new hire’s onboarding experience at the office.

Moving forward, Bacardi aims to measure more data through the app - compare countries and locations, looking specifically at data on the 90-day onboarding completion and user engagement in general.

When training HR to be more onboarding-minded and involve all stakeholders directly, you need to “give managers access, because they will know exactly what the onboardees are going through, as well as may have written the content for the app in the first place”.

Why Talentech

The Talentech onboarding app not only delivers content to every new hire, but also makes sure line managers and other stakeholders know that someone is indeed joining their department or office - sending notifications to all relevant individuals and building up to a warm welcome.

The Onboarding App starts working its magic before new hires come in for their first day and employee engagement starts as soon as the employment contract is signed.

“Whoever I show it to, everybody loves it. It’s not a hard sell to get HR and other decision makers to like it.”

And the onboarding app adoption across the offices worldwide? Bacardi has it covered.

Bacardi ran webinars to launch their new hire welcome toolkit, including introducing the onboarding app to managers. “It is super easy, I do a 1.5-hour workshop and they are good to go. It’s that simple!” says Corina. Clear, active internal communication with all local HR teams accelerated app usage by making sure administrators know their way around it.

The next big thing

The app helps decrease the need for manual reporting in people management across the whole organization.

Corina shares Bacardi’s plans moving forward, “Getting the local HR teams the right levels of access and translating more content” is the next big step in making onboarding more localized and fully embedded to the local processes while still be structured globally.

Using feedback from their new hires over the last year, Bacardi has now identified its next onboarding challenge--getting a negative mark from a new hire can alert their manager to their needs, as well as create more opportunities for a timely response.

The main goal is still to increase interactivity not only between the new employee and manager, but with their colleagues as well.