Everything you need to know about employee onboarding

Employee onboarding defined

Defined as “the process of helping new hires adjust to social and performance aspects of their new jobs”, employee onboarding is essentially the link between recruitment and employment.

Every company onboards. A few employ modern strategies to engage and inspire onboardees throughout the new hire journey. Many utilize a series of orientation activities and checkbox training modules. And 24% have no formal process in place, relying on existing staff to show new hires the ropes, which in a post-pandemic workplace is an easy way to ensure your newest hire walks right back out the door they came in.

Effective onboarding delivers an ongoing, all-inclusive experience that builds loyalty and confidence at every stage of the new hire onboarding lifecycle.

In one sentence: A comprehensive, 2-way process designed to share knowledge, communicate values, build connections and manage compliance to transform new hires into confident, empowered team members and ambassadors.

Why is employee onboarding important?

Onboarding is here to stay. 

In fact, 77% of professionals believe that onboarding is more important than ever.

But what are the tangible outcomes? What benefits will your organization see when you commit to, and invest in, a fully-fledged onboarding journey?

How to build an employee onboarding process?

Onboarding can look different depending on each organisation’s size, culture, needs, industry, etc. 

The first weeks of onboarding especially can make or break a newcomer’s experience  If you’d like to really zoom in on the first week, here are 15 steps you can follow to make it unforgettable. But we’ve also created a best practice onboarding template that includes all six C’s for the new hire lifecycle beyond that! 

How to measure onboarding success?

Most organisations recognise the need to measure their onboarding efforts, but don’t always know how to go about it. Having no clear systems in place to capture and evaluate data - or even a sense of which data to track, is usually the root of this issue.

Onboarding is proven to contribute to better engagement, time-to-productivity and retention. So for the quantitative aspect, these KPIs might be a great place to start. Don’t forget to research what your industry standards are for a better understanding of the bigger picture, and eventually start creating your own internal benchmarks to keep track of progress or fluctuations in the numbers.

By collecting feedback through your onboarding platform, you can gather qualitative insights into the overall experience, both good and bad. Use this information to provide numbers with context, and more importantly to improve the process for future hires. 

There are more metrics that you can deep-dive into for a comprehensive overview and evaluations of your onboarding efforts, but these are a good place to start.