Taking New Hires Higher: Genpact Talks Onboarding Automation for Productivity at Scale

In today's talent market, the onboarding experience has become a competitive differentiator as critical as salary or benefits. Organizations that nail those first few weeks don't just retain better talent — they activate productivity faster, reduce time-to-contribution, and create advocates who become their best recruiters.

Vidya Rao, Chief Information Transformation Officer at Genpact, shared how focusing on an improved onboarding experience is helping them do just that.

The solution? A complete onboarding automation transformation that reduced verification timelines by 60% and fundamentally changed how new employees experience their first days at the company.

Watch the complete session here or continue reading the highlights!

When Complexity Becomes Crisis

As a global advanced tech powerhouse serving 600+ enterprise clients across 30+ countries, Genpact wasn't dealing with ordinary onboarding challenges.

What started as a 20-person team managing finance functions has evolved into a 140,000-employee organization that onboards 40,000-50,000 new hires annually. Every new hire enters a web of client-specific requirements that would make most HR teams dizzy.

The complexity extended to the technology landscape itself. Genpact's onboarding process relied on multiple disconnected systems — Taleo for recruitment, Oracle for their core HRMS, various background check vendors, help desk systems, and talent supply chain management tools.

"Every customer has a very specific way they want their employees onboarded," Rao explained. Requirements range from simple education verification to comprehensive background checks and drug tests, which created:

Manual coordination chaos with HR coordinators juggling spreadsheets, calling verification vendors, and tracking which new hire needed which combination of clearances
Candidates in limbo, unsure when they could start contributing

The frustration was personal for Rao herself. When she first joined Genpact as CIO, she experienced the cumbersome onboarding process firsthand — even questioning whether she'd made the right career choice while navigating endless forms and manual processes. The experience left her determined that no other employee should face the same confusion and delays associated with a fragmented ecosystem of disconnected systems when joining what she knew was an excellent company.

The human cost was clear, but so was the business impact. Each day of onboarding delay meant another day before new hires could become billable and productive for clients. With thousands of employees onboarding annually, even small delays in the process translate to significant revenue losses across the organization.

The Partnership That Changed Everything

When Genpact began evaluating automated onboarding solutions in 2020, they knew they needed a partner, not just a vendor. Enter Phenom Onboarding (then Tydy), whose team was about to get an education in enterprise-level complexity.

"We were not the easiest clients to deal with,” Rao candidly admitted. “We were very demanding, but that is the nature of our business, and we needed it to work accordingly,” Rao recalled. What emerged was something rarer in the software world — true collaboration where customer requirements actually shaped product development.

Kiran Menon, Senior Director of Product at Phenom, reflected: "A lot of what we built into the product was fundamentally driven by the design that we got from our Genpact folks. They are a wealth of knowledge on compliance and verification — and how to get it done right." The teams worked together to create an automated employee onboarding system that could handle real-world intricacies.

Onboarding Automation Meets Simplification

The transformation wasn't about layering technology onto broken processes — it required reimagining how onboarding could work. "It helped us clean our processes as well," Rao explained. "It's not about just tweaking the tool to do what you want. It was also simplifying our processes." The Genpact HR team had to let go of elaborate workarounds that had evolved over years of manual management.

The key was finding the right balance. "Our mandate was to standardize 80% of the process, allowing 20% variance for each region," explained Menon — achieving global consistency while maintaining local flexibility.

The platform tackled the most painful touchpoints first. Document collection exemplified this transformation — what had been a manual process of back-and-forth emails, follow-ups, and coordination delays became an automated scan-and-upload workflow that eliminated friction for both HR teams and new hires.

The platform's global reach required sophisticated localization capabilities. The system delivered onboarding experiences in multiple languages across different countries, ensuring new hires could navigate the process in their preferred language regardless of location.

Within months, those 500 configurations that once required constant human intervention began running themselves.

The Numbers Tell the Story

What started as an initiative to automate regular processes has now moved to deliver personalized experiences. Using data points like location, role, and work level, the system automatically customized onboarding journeys and delivered targeted guidance to each new hire throughout their pre-boarding period.

The results spoke directly to business priorities:

50% reduction in time from offer acceptance to onboarding clearance
60% reduction in time for the overall background verification closure

"We have reduced the timeline for background verification close to 60% and the employee experience has been fantastic. We see a reduction of 50% in the time the person gets an offer and joins the company, which also means the reneges that used to happen [in this time period] have also decreased significantly,” highlighted Rao.

The transformation earned external validation when Genpact won the Brandon Hall Award for Best Candidate Experience, recognizing their success in "Reimagining onboarding process with Technology."

Building Tomorrow on Today's Foundation

Genpact's onboarding automation success has become the foundation for broader digital transformation. As they migrate to Workday as their primary HCM system, the simplified automated onboarding processes they established are proving invaluable for their next wave of AI implementations.

"I'm glad we did this because now the processes are simplified. It's so much easier to build smaller AI solutions with a much cleaner stack," Rao noted.

The company plans to integrate other Phenom solutions alongside their Workday implementation, building on their automated employee onboarding foundation.

The Strategic Imperative

For Rao, the transformation became deeply personal. The CIO who once questioned whether she'd made the right career move became the architect of a critical process that reflects Genpact's commitment to excellence.

Reflecting on their journey, Rao offered practical guidance, "Keep it simple. Integrations are a lot cleaner if you ensure what HR wants and what IT wants."

But beyond the technical considerations lies a fundamental truth: "Your onboarding experience reflects what your company is, what your culture is," Rao concluded. "So you really need to make it seamless and fantastic."

Genpact's journey offers a clear message: the right employee onboarding automation partnership can transform your biggest operational headache into a competitive advantage — one new hire at a time.

Struggling with complex onboarding challenges like Genpact?

Watch our on-demand webinar on how to create the onboarding experience everyone wants

Apurba R
Apurba is a writer who specializes in creating engaging content, backed by storytelling, data, SEO and a cup of coffee. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, cooking fusion food, or curiously traveling like a local.