I’m old enough to remember when people were fired and hired.
Nowadays, however, companies “separate” and “onboard.”
The former I understand. “Fired” is ugly. “Separating” sounds like a mutual decision, a no-fault divorce where both parties agree to stay friendly for the kids’ sake. Which means they snipe at each other exclusively by text.
Onboarding, though, is weird. I mean, what’s so wrong with just being hired?
My wife, who is transitioning from the medical profession, with hundreds of its own buzzwords, and into a role as a business office manager, told me last week she had to onboard a new employee. I asked if I should be concerned, or if she had something she needed to tell me.
“No, silly,” she said. In truth, she called me something much worse than silly, but this is a family newspaper. Besides, she didn’t really mean it.
She explained that onboarding is what used to be known as “filling out paperwork,” the reams of eligibility, direct deposit, benefits and tax forms that every new employee must contend with.
In the old days, completing this documentation meant slouching over a warped table in a musty room, the walls yellow with cigarette smoke exhaled by long-dead employees. You wrote your address, again and again, signed your name on multiple X’s, and smiled shyly at your soon-to-be colleagues as they wandered in to use the ancient coffee machine, send a fax or check out the fresh meat.
If you were lucky, the powers-that-be paid you for this drudgery.
If you were a little less lucky, they sent you home to fill out the forms without pay, but at least you could sit near a window, minus the staring strangers, and ponder how much better your life would be if you had been born a squirrel or a chipmunk. Even when said critter had been obliterated by a Ford F-150 on the double-yellow line in front of your house.
When you arrived for your first shift, you deposited this bundle of dead trees (brave soldiers, sacrificed for the corporation) into the maw of human resources, where shadowy figures with glowing eyes and arcane job titles would ever so slowly induce a process that ended, weeks later, with the birth of your first paycheck.
No more, at least at my wife’s company, where they use employee-directed onboarding. New hires themselves are responsible for entering all that data directly into an app or program, minus the middlemen. Woe be it to those who transpose digits on their bank routing number or forget their SSN. These mistakes could cost them, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.
Honestly, I’m glad I’m not in the market for a new job these days. I feel like the world has moved on without me. I don’t want to sit in some impersonal kiosk and fill out an application on an iPad or wait for a text from a prospective employer asking when I want to come in for an interview. (“Do you like me? Check yes or no.”)
Nor do I want to be onboarded. It sounds too much like waterboarded for comfort. But maybe, given the daily indignities of many jobs, waterboarding isn’t such a stretch.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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