How carwow provide a consistent welcome for every new hire

carwow exist to make choosing and buying your perfect car easy and enjoyable. Starting out in 2010 they were determined to improve the entire car buying experience.

By comparing the best offers from top local and national dealers, you get the car you want, from the dealer you like best, at a price that’s right for you.

Since then £2B+ worth of cars have been bought via carwow and they’ve grown to 150+ employees.

Why great employee onboarding is important to carwow

We spoke to Michael, the People and Talent Coordinator at carwow. He’s involved in some aspects of recruitment, but his main focus has been on employee wellbeing and onboarding. For Michael, that’s about looking after team members as soon as their offer is made and being there to welcome them once they get through the front door.

At carwow, there’s a clear vision for why a great onboarding experience is important. “Those first few weeks are really key. Having a smooth entry into your job is the difference between settling well into that company or not,” Michael shared. “To be bought into the idea of carwow you need to know what we do, where we sit in the industry, what your role is and what other peoples roles involve.”

Having a standardised new starter process is important to them as “it means we know that person has access to the right information but more importantly at the right time.”It’s also part of the wider vision for the people team. “We want to develop our current workforce, so people being able to see the opportunity for progression is vital to keeping them interested.”

When hiring at scale manual processes stop working

When you’re hiring 10 people a month organising this experience becomes very manual. As Michael said, “the key word there is manual.”

The team would have an outline of the sessions they wanted each new starter to take part in. “For example, take our Industry 101 onboarding session. One of the team runs through how the auto industry works with new employees. It’s important for new hires to hear this, as they need to understand how carwow fits in.”

Previously, carwow would have to remember if theyhad set up a session already for a previous new starter, find it in the calendar, invite the next new person. If one hadn’t been created they had to manually create it, find a time, and invite everyone.

There was lots of room for mistakes. “It meant that sometimes people weren’t available or new hires weren’t being added or ended up having two sessions at the same time. Not having it all in one place meant it was difficult to navigate.”

Using automation to remove the stress

The People team needed a way for the onboarding sessions to be created without them having to constantly check calendars.

carwow are using Personably to keep their sessions in a centralised place, from where their onboarding can be controlled and scheduled automatically.

Michael told us, “the main reason we wanted to start using Personably for this was the time saving. But actually it ended up being the sheer stress relief of automation that made the biggest difference.”

“You know when your new starter is about to come through the door on a Monday that you have everything already set up for them. It’s far better for Personably to plan it for you.”

With just one click, the Industry 101s, team intros and everything else is scheduled.

Making a positive impact on the new employees

Using Personably has “made such a difference to the new starters - it’s really nice to see them all in the same sessions and without any confusion.”

As Michael said, “starting off a journey right completely influences how you continue it and whether you decide to end it. If it starts well you’ll want to stay, so great onboarding has a big impact on retention.”