PerStart

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

Onboarding systems focus on automating processes based on the typical new hire in the typical new hire workflow.  Our vision transforms how organizations view onboarding, focusing on pre-boarding from the new hire’s perspective — their story. We provide specific customizable learning experiences to ensure diverse new hires' success and performance, allowing the organization to tell its onboarding story.  

We storytell onboarding. We deliver storified learning experiences for preboarding and onboarding — linking the stories of the new hire, the hiring manager, the team, and the organization.  

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 its dynamics and execute its 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.

Organizations must empower participants to move at increasing rates of change they drive towards digital transformation, sustainability, carbon neutrality, racial equity, and diversity. To fuel this change, organizations must reimagine their workforce, create outreach, and bring more diverse parties into their workforce, businesses, and supply chains. Story provides the opportunity to onboard the intersectionality of perspectives.

We have been delivering onboarding and learning experiences since 2015.  We have developed platform demonstration courses as entry points and written supporting books that convey the core of our solutions. 

Preboarding Story Experience Four Weeks to Work

Onboarding PerStart

We also have written two playbooks to assist the new hire and hiring team. 

Our programs provide customizable story modules to transition a new hire’s preboarding and onboarding experience into career-long performance and development. Our pre-boarding and onboarding programs focus on:

• Organized storylines for 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. 

Our solutions are an HTML5, multi-device-ready experience, and platform. This 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 onboarding and preboarding content offer flexibility in hosting and delivery. Organizations may choose to repurpose as HTML5, xAPI, or SCORM packages to create new experiences for internal audiences or expand to new diverse populations via various digital channels. The flexibility built into the design also allows for sustainably responsive mixing of in-person, virtual instruction, and performance support with the onboarding modules.

We provide in-depth knowledge and support and work to ensure programs successfully launch an organization's chosen platform. We have specific experience developing training and supporting testing on corporate learning platforms. All modules are translation-ready, allowing for global translations and localization to situational markets (e.g. empowerment zones throughout the United States and globe).

See business model.

Our solutions are reliant on content and working with enterprise customers.  Solutions are delivered to the customer's network, internal systems, and learning management systems so that we do not access personal or privacy data.

We develop custom branded learning experiences deployed globally with major are deployed and support enterprise technology platforms with custom learning development for their enterprise customers. 

Our scale and impact are with the organizations we can work with their employee base and supply chain. Solutions developed are transferred to their networks, learning management systems, and customer/partner portals for usage.  

We are currently developing custom solutions with three Dow 30 corporations developing learning that services their customers, employees, and supply chain. 

Challenges facing diverse and inclusive new hires are expanding beyond the digital transformation and disruptions caused by Covid-19. Organizations are already engaging us to develop meaningful solutions that embrace sustainability, climate, employee experience, and racial equity. 

We measure impact in the projects we can participate in and deliver. We seek projects that we would put on our refrigerator for our kids to see:

• An Impact Accelerator learning curriculum focused on empowering diversity in the supply chain. 
• An employee code of conduct learning experience focused on doing the right thing. 

2 FULL TIME

3 Contractors

Mike O’Brien started SmarterMedium in 2004 with the premise that learning could be continually enhanced by customized branding solutions to the enterprise and innovating the delivery medium. His initial focus was training guides for introducing cloud technologies, becoming an early partner of SAP SuccessFactors and a thought leader in the talent management and development space. Creating a process for rapidly developing, tailoring, and producing learning experiences for HR and talent management topics, SmarterMedium was able to work with hundreds of global organizations deploying learning for employees, managers, and leadership. 

Today, Mike continues to lead SmarterMedium by continually reinventing its learning delivery, assisting organizations globally to reach, engage and involve their workforce, and customers with change and innovation. We have learned with the best organizations across the globe and honed our offering, distilling the best processes for developing learning experiences that lead to improving performance. 

In addition to learning experience development, we have contributed with our own voice — publishing three books and a catalog of learning experiences to assist with learning development and onboarding.

Our focus is on what we can contribute, projects we can deliver, and the impact that they can have. We develop learning experiences for influencing bias, code of conduct training, and support of racial justice and equality initiatives. 

For tangible organizational goals, we are currently working through the process of applying for BCorp certification and hope to complete that in 2022. 

On 09/10/2021, we received an email from MIT Solve that this challenge deadline had been extended and would we consider reapplying from our previous proposal. In 2018, we applied to the MIT Solve 'Work of the Future' challenge. Revisiting this response, we realized that the need for technology platforms to embrace onboarding as a means to increase the diversity and inclusion of their hiring processes remains, and we have evolved to meet these challenges in new ways. 

We have been successful on these fronts in developing custom programs that open supply chains to be more inclusive and diverse, build onboarding programs, and code of conduct policies programs that embrace inclusion. 

Since our application in 2018, we have continued developing and deepening our understanding of how to engage workforces best, onboard employees, and expand diversity and inclusion for new hires to large organizations. We continue to see the fundamental issue that organizations' onboarding process, technologies, and platforms continue to focus on the process of onboarding rather than the story of onboarding. For inclusive onboarding to be successful, it must engender confidence in the opportunity as much as it streamlines the process steps. 

ServiceNow platform offerings in the onboarding space automate and deliver workflows surrounding the new hire process. Our storytelling approach and solutions complement ServiceNow and could expand its capabilities with storytelling and preboarding. Our approach to organizational branding and storytelling would allow for deepening integration between ServiceNow and their enterprise customers. 

In addition to end customers and technology platforms, we are interested in building connections and forming partnerships with thought leaders. We monitor the business and technology research (MIT Tech Review, MIT Sloan Review) for ideas and trends.  

As we stated earlier, the transformative challenges facing excluded populations go beyond digital transformation and current disruptions related to the pandemic. We see great organizations embracing meaningful climate and sustainability goals in their outreach to new employees and customers. 

We would welcome partnering with technology platforms embracing onboarding and integrating learning into large enterprises and thought leaders innovating employee experiences from technology and the future of work perspectives. Moreover, collaborating to assist organizations looking to develop learning programs integrated into large enterprises where the perspective of the new employee and the organization are highlighted and valued.