PerStart Onboarding Platform

Jumping into the accelerating digital economy requires knowledge, perspective, and confidence. PerStart provides pre-boarding momentum for success day one. 

Every new hire’s story is unique. They don’t write their story to quit on day one, yet we know that four percent of new hires leave after a disastrous first day. They don’t plan to leave within six months, yet nearly 20 percent do. They, like the organizations that hire them, are hoping for a better onboarding outcome. 

Today, addressing digital transformation and digital inclusion through skills training and traditional onboarding effectively drop some new hires into a digital rip current. Those already digitally proficient will overcome the current, while others will struggle and will not advance against these digital currents with traditional learning pathways. Unsupported, individuals not digitally fluent will continue to struggle and fail. Confidence and inclusion expressed by the hiring organization allow their new hires to not only survive the constantly churning waters, but also learn to swim out of the digital rip currents. Our onboarding programs can reshape how an organization values and communicates with new hires — onboarding them with confidence in this new digital economy.  

How the organization and new hire view the time between offer acceptance and first day can have a significant impact on the successful pre-boarding of the new hire. PerStart enables organizations to bridge the expanding outreach and inclusion success of recruiting to the initial performance start needed on day one. While simple, it is a critical element of a pre-hire’s journey and ultimately their success. 

Numerous onboarding systems are either directly created by or expanded from talent management or recruiting solutions. Their focus automates the connection between the applicant tracking system to the HR systems, streamlining information and forms needed.  Our solution is different. We recognize that onboarding, especially pre-boarding, can be a life-changing time filled with potential anxieties that require support from the organization. PerStart provides tailored coaching - during the valuable time between job acceptance and the first day - that helps grow required starting knowledge, provides perspective, and builds confidence. 

PerStart provides enterprises with ten readily configurable and customizable modules to transition a new hire’s pre-hire experience into career-long performance and development. Our pre-boarding programs focus on:

• pre-boarding activities that create shared perspectives between the new hire and team.  
• customizing content to represent the organization’s branding, knowledge, and perspective.
• sharing the workplace culture and building confidence to get the new hire started on a track toward performance. 
• mirroring knowledge and resources alongside the challenges and opportunities a new hire faces during onboarding. 

With the increased pace of skills migrating and transitioning to new technologies and new digital workflows, the importance of quickly forging a strong link between the new employee and the organization has never been more critical. Aligning the employee with their expected performance provides greater flexibility for the organization to change their dynamics and execute their strategies. PerStart delivers pathways to navigate the exponential acceleration of the digital economy that is driving digital fluency to an even greater demand to reaching full performance. 

The PerStart solution empowers organizations to better onboarding new hires and prepare the teams that will be supporting them. PerStart leverages advances in the digital economy to power outreach and onboard individuals that provides personalized experience and opportunity to join the organization. Through immersive and inclusive engagement, we leverage digital technologies now to assist in closing the gaps created in the future of work. The PerStart learning experience is the result of the evolution of an agile design process creating a new breed of micro-learning experiences for new employees, customers, and partners.

PerStart is an HTML5, multi-device ready experience and platform. PerStart allows the pre-hire to bring their own device to the experience and allows the organization to brand and customize the experience to their requirements. Organizations adopt, adapt, brand, and build upon the platform to convey their unique knowledge and preparation. The result is a rapid-deployment, scalable, pre-boarding platform branded to the organization’s unique requirements. The experience has customizable themes and branding integrated into their DNA so that organizations can adapt them to their specifications, brand requirements, and speak to new hires in their authentic voice.

Our 12 month goals: 

1. Leverage contacts to market solutions to HR and Recruiting stakeholders at enterprise organizations focused on onboarding diverse talent.
2. Publish a book to drive awareness of the importance of coaching, perspective, and story in pre-boarding.  
3. Pursue design challenge and recognition for innovative designs in the onboarding/hr tech space.
4. Build and execute an organizational and funding roadmap that allows for greater exposure and pace of growth.

Our vision transforms how organizations view onboarding with a focus on pre-boarding from the new hire’s perspective with specific programs to ensure the success and performance of new hires. 

1. Build a sustainable platform and knowledge corpus to positively impact the success of inclusive hiring and hiring at large organizations.
2. Adapt and grow technologically to innovate the best experience continually (e.g., using voice assisted technologies to provide onboarding preparation on a conversation medium).
3. Expand the onboarding corpus to help diverse populations with specialized programs providing the knowledge and coaching related to joining the digital economy.

We reach and assist individuals joining the digital economy by empowering organizations to better onboard diverse populations and create links to full performance and development. By creating a sustainable platform and knowledge corpus to positively impact the success of inclusive hiring and hiring at large organizations allows us to grow sustainably with recurring revenue and growth through additional content and services to existing clients and acquire new enterprise clients. 

Today we work in the cloud, developing and delivering learning courses for organizations launching and deploying cloud systems, onboarding users, and employees, and seeking to better engage employees digitally through user adoption, learning, or digital transformation. Through our evolution, we have moved from step by step instruction to benefits and features, to story that engages, and now to inclusive content. Programs developed by SmarterMedium in 2017/2018 include onboarding programs, user adoption, digital transformation and cultural onboarding programs used by global enterprises. 

Micro-learning strategies allow us to assemble dynamic and transformative learning content that becomes personalized to the learner and organization. Through immersive and inclusive engagement, digital technologies can now be used to assist in closing the gaps created in the future of work.  Our 2018 strategy:

1. Individual: Produce and deliver a standard solution and playbook for use by individuals and small organizations. 
2. Lead Sales: Deliver micro-learning programs for usage of 12 large organizations. 
3. Enterprise: Engage four large organizations to develop fully customized platforms. 

We expect that initial sales to market expanded opportunities and recurring growth.

Since 2004, SmarterMedium has been providing custom digital learning for organizations’ talent management programs. From hundreds of deployments, we learned that a majority of content could be standardized to provide a corpus of knowledge that is repeatable and rapidly customizable from client-to-client. This model enables us to develop and launch multi-lingual implementations quickly, efficiently, and always improving the core content for future deployments. By customizing to the organization, we deliver higher value and benefit to the customer. Our technology and methodology have a proven track record in delivering for the world’s top brands and organizations. 

SmarterMedium is a self-funded creative agency with a long history of positive financial health and organic growth. The PerStart program follows our onboarding pricing and delivery framework that is flexible to the enterprise and boasts continuous improvement and development. 

PerStart is priced via a statement of work and scope definition in four ways: 

1. Off-the-shelf and individual solutions:  sold as individual content, per seat, small team, and online. 
2. Micro-learnings: ideal for quick introductions and performance support provide outreach learning.
3. Branded experiences: leverage existing modules mixing brand pre-built content and custom modules to reflect an organization’s unique identity.
4. Custom platforms: collaborative, flexible, custom content development, extended learning experiences.

The program is available for sale through SAP Education and SAP SuccessFactors Professional Services as custom programs. In addition to the PerStart course revenue, we offer additional services including LMS hosting, translation, and other services as needed. We believe we have the foundation in place for significant enterprise scale. The advent of an increased focus on inclusive hiring fits perfectly within our proven model. Our robust base content and proprietary tailoring methodology will allow us to help companies of all sizes more rapidly and successfully onboard new hires.

Fundamentally we have learned that enterprise sales and growth is built from having not only compelling and shared solutions, but it is from also creditability. MIT Solve’s thought leadership in the future of work provides a credibility statement that we can leverage with corporate HR departments worldwide. This credibility will further allow us to pursue influencers and organizations that can assist in developing new content and methodologies for inclusive onboarding. We can use this interest and recognition to create new pre-boarding programs accessible for distinct populations. 

Enterprise sales start fundamentally with credibility.  For years we have leveraged the credibility of SAP and SuccessFactors to develop solutions and positively impact performance outcomes. Moving forward we risk the potential failure to achieve critical mass of revenue needed to accelerate our growth and the inability to gain exposure and mindshare over the cacophony of solutions and apps flooding the digital marketplace. We are inherently a learning organization and hope to learn from the MIT Solve community of innovators and leaders to advise, question, and challenge us with their perspective on setting new success standards in the digital economy.