Onboarding Best Practices: Maximizing the Use of Employee Onboarding Software
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Effective new hire onboarding is crucial for setting the tone of a new employee's journey within an organization.
- Great onboarding increases employee retention by 82% and increases retention for new hires by 52%.
- Organizations with effective employee onboarding have an average of 33% higher employee engagement.
- Good onboarding correlates with up to a 70% increase in new hire productivity.
In our digital age, companies are leveraging employee onboarding software to streamline and enhance the onboarding process. This technology not only simplifies administrative tasks but benefits employers and employees—automating onboarding tasks results in an 18% improvement in initial performance. A well-executed onboarding process boosts employee engagement, reduces turnover, and fosters a sense of belonging.
How the Right Software Strengthens Employee Onboarding
It’s important to understand why employee onboarding is gaining in popularity. Onboarding traditionally involves a lot of paperwork, manual data entry, and often navigating complex legal and compliance components. This consumes much valuable time from HR professionals, and easy-to-make errors can lead to a less-than-optimal employee experience (and first impression). 44% of new employees have regrets or second thoughts about their new gig within the first week—you don’t want bungled onboarding to torpedo your recruiting efforts.
Employee onboarding software can automate many aspects of the onboarding process, from document management to compliance. It ensures a smoother, more efficient onboarding experience, allowing HR teams to focus on more strategic tasks like getting their happy, engaged employees up to speed.
Employee onboarding software, however, doesn’t exist in a silo. To get the best results, users will utilize their employee onboarding solution alongside best practices. That’s what we’ll be covering in this post: the best practices for maximizing the use of employee onboarding software.
The Best Practices for Optimizing Employee Onboarding Software
- Automate as Much as Possible
- Ensure You’re Being Compliant
- Personalize Your Employee Onboarding
- Seamlessly Integrate Your Employee Onboarding With Your HR Suite
- Establish a Feedback Loop
- Prioritize Clear, Concise Communication
- Set Realistic Expectations During Recruiting
- Set ROI Metrics
Automate as Much as Possible
Take advantage of automated workflows to streamline repetitive tasks. Automation reduces manual effort, minimizes errors, and accelerates the onboarding process.
By automating much of the paperwork aspect of employee onboarding, you can free up time for your hiring team and stakeholders to focus on more strategic aspects of the process. Automation will also guarantee consistency in the onboarding process.
Ensure You're Being Compliant
Compliance is of the utmost importance for employee onboarding. Employees must understand basic legal and policy-driven rules and regulations and must be legally able to perform their roles for your organization (and submit the required paperwork, rendering them legally able to do so). Most competitive onboarding software has the necessary workflows and automation necessary to ensure compliance, but it’s up to you to set this up and ensure it’s running smoothly.
Personalize Your Employee Onboarding
Not every role or industry does—or should—have the same onboarding process. It’s a best practice to tailor your employee onboarding process based on roles and departments. The best employee onboarding software allows you to create personalized workflows that address the needs of various roles, departments, and industries.
Seamlessly Integrate Your Employee Onboarding With Your HR Suite
The top reason businesses purchase HR tech is to gain greater functionality. Much as employee onboarding software doesn’t exist in a silo and needs best practices to function optimally, it should also seamlessly integrate with the existing HR systems in your tech suite. This ensures data consistency and eliminates the need for duplicate data entry (which reduces the risk of error). It also delivers an optimal experience to both the new employees being onboarded and the current employees doing the onboarding.
Establish a Feedback Loop
Incorporate a real-time feedback mechanism to gather insights into the onboarding experience. This can be through surveys or just a check-in with new managers. Feedback allows organizations to identify areas for improvement and make adjustments to enhance the employee onboarding process.
It’s also an innovative way to differentiate yourself from lesser employee onboarding experiences. Historically, only 20% of companies asked employees for feedback on the onboarding process, even though new hires are 91% more likely to improve their connection with the managers right away when asked for meaningful feedback.
Prioritize Clear, Concise Communication
Clear, respectful communication is crucial during recruiting and continues once a hire is made, extending into employee onboarding. Communication between an organization and its employees is key, especially during the time between accepting a job and starting it. Ensure your onboarding software is capable of sending thoughtful, clear, concise information that prioritizes the employee experience and makes them feel like they made the right decision by saying yes to your job.
Set Realistic Expectations During Recruiting
A common complaint among employees that turnover quickly is that what they were sold during the interview process didn’t match the reality of the role they said yes to. Ensure that your new hires clearly understand their role and responsibilities, as well as what you’ll expect of them starting with onboarding. This should start during recruiting (recruiting and onboarding should ideally be strategized together). The best employee onboarding software should complement the best hiring experience not be the cause of questions/concerns.
Set ROI Metrics
If you want to know whether you’ve maximized your employee onboarding software, you’ll want to calculate your return on investment (ROI). To do so, set the KPIs and metrics to showcase if the software works. Are you looking to save time? Strengthen employee retention? Supercharge time-to-productivity? Knowing what you want your employee onboarding software to do will help determine its effectiveness.
Conclusion
Employee onboarding software is a powerful tool contributing to a positive onboarding experience. By implementing these best practices, organizations can maximize the impact of onboarding software, ensuring that new hires feel welcomed, informed, and ready to contribute to the company's success from day one. A well-structured onboarding process sets the foundation for long-term employee satisfaction and success.
About HiringThing
HiringThing is a modern recruiting and employee onboarding platform as a service that creates seamless talent experiences. Our white label solutions and open API enable technology and service providers to offer hiring and onboarding to their clients. Approachable and adaptable, the platform empowers anyone, anywhere to build their dream team.
