Why a Good Onboarding Experience Matters for Your Business

You already know how much first impressions matter: they set a course that is difficult to alter. And it’s no different with new employees. Onboarding is your opportunity to give new hires a great first impression, and good onboarding can help achieve real business results through better retention rates and increased productivity.

Build a Positive Employer Brand

As the first real touchpoint with your company, onboarding sets a standard for how employees receive support. It gives new hires a sense of the quality of HR services offered to them and sets a tone for how your company engages with employees in general. And today, when word of mouth can spread quickly across social media and websites like Glassdoor, positive onboarding experiences have become increasingly important. Quick and painless onboarding helps you foster a positive employer brand right off the bat by giving new hires an immediate positive experience to share with peers. Inversely, a negative onboarding experience can lead to higher turnover rates - and employees who leave your company are likely to share their bad experience. Because negative word of mouth impacts recruiting and retention efforts, providing a positive onboarding experience is crucial for your employer brand.

Get Better Retention Rates

It’s been proven that companies with strong onboarding processes see better retention rates and increased productivity. Giving employees a positive experience in their first interactions with your company translates into better employee engagement from the very start. We know better employee engagement reduces turnover (thereby reducing recruiting costs) and increases employees’ productivity. By supporting increased employee engagement, good onboarding can have a direct impact on your business results, helping you realize real value for your company.

Create a Good Onboarding Experience

A great onboarding process sounds wonderful in theory, but in reality, it can be hard to achieve. It’s complicated, with lots of components, and may be a different process for different types of employees, creating even more work for HR -- especially when managing compliance across worker agreements and regions. Often, many aspects of the process are manually managed and performed by HR, which can lead to mistakes and longer turnaround times, likely frustrating your new employees. Automating as much of the process as possible can help alleviate HR’s heavy workload, and help your team finish the onboarding process quickly to get your new hires to work faster. Also, starting the onboarding process before your new hire’s first day can help speed the process along by resolving paperwork and getting your employee up to speed on policies before they even start working.

Want to learn more about why great onboarding matters? Check out our new ebook!