How to Onboard a New Hire into Your Compliance Training Program

The first week of a new job is overwhelming. While compliance training is mandatory, hitting a new employee with eight hours of e-learning on Day 1 is a recipe for a bad candidate experience. Here is how to pace it out.

1. Identify the Day 1 requirements

Very few compliance topics actually need to be completed on the employee's first day. The ones that do are usually safety-related or legally mandated by your specific industry.

• First week essentials: Employee Handbook acknowledgment, building safety orientation, initial IT security review.
• First 30 days: Harassment Prevention training, detailed cybersecurity courses, full Code of Conduct reviews.

Push as much training into the 14-to-30-day window as you legally can. Let them learn their job and meet their team first.

2. Automate the assignment

If you have to remember to log into your LMS and manually assign Harassment Training every time you hire someone, you will eventually forget one.

Set up an automated rule in your system. For example: "When an employee is added to the 'Engineering' role, automatically assign them the Employee Handbook policies and the generic Cybersecurity SCORM course with a 14-day deadline."

3. Align new hires with your annual cycle

This is the most common operational headache in compliance programs. Suppose you run your company-wide Harassment Training every October. A new hire starts in August and takes their initial Harassment Training. Do they have to take it again with the rest of the company in October?

You have two choices:

1. Individual Anniversaries: Employees renew their training based on the anniversary of when they first completed it during onboarding (or based on their hire date anniversary).
   Pros: Spreads the training load evenly throughout the year without massive spikes.
   Cons: Extremely difficult to track manually; you are dealing with training deadlines every single week of the year.
2. The Anchor Date (Recommended): You define a company-wide "training month" (e.g., October). If a new hire takes the training between January and July, they take it again in October to sync up. If they take it in August or September, they are granted a grace period and skip that October cycle.
   Pros: You only think about company-wide compliance once a year. The rest of the year is just onboarding maintenance.

4. Follow up without being a nag

New hires have a lot of emails to process. Your compliance deadline might get buried under benefits enrollments and IT setup instructions. Set up a system with automated, spaced reminders (for instance, at the halfway mark and right before the deadline) so you don't have to chase them manually.

5. Verify completion before their probationary period ends

Failing to complete mandatory compliance training is often grounds for termination, especially in heavily regulated roles or states. Work with managers to ensure that compliance completion is checked before the employee's 30/60/90 day review. If they can't be trusted to sign a policy document, it is an early indicator of larger performance issues.

Set it and forget it with Ethica
Ethica's Smart Assignments automatically assign policies and interactive SCORM courses based on the roles you add employees to. Just add their email, and Ethica handles the assignment, tracking, and reminder emails. Start your free trial.