An Opportunity to Drive Engagement and Boost Retention
Onboarding is an enormous and untapped opportunity to drive engagement and retention among your employees. It’s not just a single phase and it’s not just a separate process: Modern onboarding is a way of guiding the employee through their entire journey — and continuously cultivate and strengthen the company culture the whole way. Done well, it turns successful candidates into successful employees, and into successful ambassadors of your company brand as well.
Modern onboarding is paperless, automated, mobile friendly, integrated and scalable. It’s efficient. It’s streamlined and easy to use. It starts the moment they say yes, but the onboarding experience continues far beyond Day One or even Week One.
The modern onboarding experience continues throughout the course of Year One, and then beyond. It taps into the excitement of saying yes and sustains it throughout the employee lifecycle.
Modern onboarding taps into the excitement of saying yes and sustains it throughout the employee lifecycle.
What’s Different, What’s The Same?
Of course your company needs to cover all the administrative needs your company has, so your employee is ready to hit the ground running and can do their job. But modern onboarding also helps create incredible connections — between employees and their team, their managers, the HR team, the company.
It anchors the employee into the very culture of your organization. And this breed of onboarding continues during all points of transition for the employee, including: promotions, transfers, M&A, offboarding, and re-boarding as well.
Modern onboarding is not just a phase. It’s a sustained solution. It’s a long-term approach to talent management that factors in the realities of the world of work today, the new culture and behaviors of work, and our modern understanding of the employee journey. Because of that, it’s a tremendous tool when it comes to driving employee engagement and retention. It’s also largely untapped, as you’ll see.
Nearly half (49%) of organizations are in the process of updating their onboarding programs. This eBook is designed to help organizations make the best decisions about shifting to modern onboarding now, and tap into the incredible power of this vital part of the employee experience — for their benefit and for yours.
The Recruiting Challenge: A Model for Onboarding
We know that recruiting top talent is vital to organizational success. That successful talent acquisition depends on a range of elements lining up for each and every hire. Skilled, friendly recruiting teams. A winning employer brand and a dynamic marketing strategy that makes it stand out. A high-quality, memorable candidate experience. By necessity we’ve turned the effort to hire great talent into a tremendous, multifaceted, multiplatform dance.
Companies are ever hungry for top talent — and willing to go the extra mile to land it. That’s in part because today, it’s a buyer’s market. It’s not a stretch to say we need employees more than employees may need us. The national unemployment in 2025 was still in the 4 percent range, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
We need to fill positions more frequently. To wit:
- In September 2024, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics highlights how the median tenure of employees dropped to its lowest rate in over 20 years, down to 3.9 years on average.
- HireClix found that 54% of Gen Z workers planned to quit, an increase from the previous year.
- Millennials have been found to job hop more than previous generations, per Gallup
The Employee Experience is Just as Key
70% of employees who had exceptional onboarding experiences say they have “the best possible job” and are 2.6x more likely to very satisfied with their workplace – talk about a clear path to retention!
Yet this is often ignored in the factor of decreased attention spans, yet ever more sophisticated radar — on messaging, culture, tone, appeal, alignment with an individual’s values and goals. All adds up to a sum total of candidate experience. It’s not surprise that the company and its recruiters and hiring teams that provides the best candidate experience usually wins.
A great candidate experience is what transforms a search, click, and “sure, I’m interested” into “yes!!” …and we need to do that for employees as well.
The employee experience is just as critical and onboarding is a profoundly powerful way to provide a phenomenal, meaningful employee experience that continues through the entire employee journey.
So if you want improved ROI on recruiting and hiring, you can’t merely settle for lackluster onboarding just because it’s free with your ATS or HRIS. Your employees, new hires, and HR deserve better.
5 Vital Statistics
Make your onboarding program as strong and vibrant as it can be, and you’ll see a marked improvement in the health of your bottom line.
- Companies with an engaging onboarding program retained 91% of their first-year workers. (SHRM)
- New hires who went through a well-structured onboarding program were 69% more like to remain at a company for up to three years. (SHRM)
- Companies with an efficient onboarding process enjoyed a 60% year-over-year improvement in revenue. (Aberdeen)
- Companies with an efficient onboarding process also saw a 63% year-over-year improvement in customer satisfaction. (Aberdeen)
How to Take Onboarding From Tedium to Engagement
It’s a flawed compromise: the mindset of “let’s just get these new hires onboarded and we’ll tackle the big picture next year” school of thought. Every crop of new hires who experience this kind of fallback onboarding is not only at risk for increase disengagement, but they may well share their lackluster onboarding experience on portals and job boards. Call it the Yelp generation, but employers should assume that a negative experience is likely to be shared.
These are real quotes from employees about their own onboarding experiences, taken from such sources as Glassdoor.com. What they show is that not only are employees paying attention to onboarding, they are more than willing to share their experience — as a caution — to others.
What’s a Company To Do?
Administration is vital, to be sure. Employers need all those t’s crossed. The forms filled out. Trainings accomplished. Enough direction, instruction, and information so that employees can get up to speed and join the workflow as soon as possible.
But too often, with this in mind, the process and its materials have absolutely none of the appeal and pizzazz of the recruiting and hiring materials. Some common complaints:
- Paper or screen-based, It’s a clunky process.
- It’s hard to use and confusing.
- It lacks basic capabilities, like being able to save a form in progress and review before finalizing.
- It has a generic look and feel, bearing little that reflects the employer brand.
- It requires the employee stay tethered to either in the HR department or in the office in order to fill out either proprietary documents, all in order.
- It requires actual hand-offs from manager to employee and back again — a whole lot of manual time and energy for both of them.
Modern onboarding can fulfill the same function but also speak directly to what the employee needs and expects. It can provide a favorable experience that triggers assimilation and engagement — so that ultimately, the employee wants to be, and can be, an advocate for their employer and its brand.
What Modern Onboarding Looks Like
Focus on Employee Wants and Needs
Employees have a right to expect onboarding that provides them with a positive, engaging, interesting, seamless, intuitive user experience. Why? Because in every other realm of their experience, that’s what they get. They expect access and information at their fingertips. Even more so, they (and we) need it. In the digitally run workplace they are burdened with more tasks to accomplish in the same amount of time.
Employees want to know they were right to say yes. They want their initial decision to be reinforced. Modern onboarding may be the first experience to answer that question.
On a psychological level, employees want to know they were right to say yes. They want their initial decision to be reinforced. Modern onboarding may be the first experience to answer that question. When your onboarding expresses your value proposition as an employer, reflects the company culture and mission, and is clearly designed to support employees and convey that the employer appreciates their time and energy, the answer is the affirmative. And that is where employee engagement takes root.
Review Needs with Key Decision-Makers
What the specifics of your own modern onboarding platform look like are entirely up to you as the employer. But what’s most important is that your onboarding system meets the needs of all the decision-makers involved in your process, is designed for ease of use, and reinforces the culture of your company — across departments, different employee types, and locations.
Take an inventory of tasks and requirements. Look at the company’s own culture and identify it, to make sure the onboarding platform — or platforms — embody your brand and values.
What do you need your onboarding system to do? Do you need it to integrate with ATS, HRIS, LMS? Whatever systems you use, onboarding should be best-in-class and accretive to all of the other investments you have made in HR Tech.
Also, look at your other HR processes: What is working? Look at recruiting platforms, as well as recognition or rewards software, automatic payroll. Is there a way to connect these together and make sure they can all function continuously? Can they all create useful data across the board? Are they speaking the same language?
What kind of culture and engagement efforts already exist, such as recognition and rewards programs, mentoring and advocacy, that could be connected to the onboarding platform?
What Employees Want From Your Onboarding System
- Work / life integration
- Seemlessness with other tasks
- Customizable
- Flexible and fixable
- Easy platform with intuitive features
- Mobile and secure
- Self-guided from beginning to end
- Reflects employer and company culture
- Provides avenues of communication
- Always on an accessible
What you need to provide:
- Integrates new employees with a new company or team, and its culture
- Gives employees the tools and info needed to become productive team members
- Minimizes employee anxiety and increases comfort — showing them that you do care about their success within your business
- Lets new hires work in the way they want, with US based support for both candidates and clients to help facilitate conversations
- Provides candidates a self-guided and empowering experience from the beginning
- Integrates with existing ATS, HRIS and CRA solutions so both HR and new hires experience a streamlined process
- Enables faster assimilation, quicker time to productivity and results delivered faster
- Ensures that new hires hit each touchpoint in the process without skipping or missing a thing
Cover the Bases — Your Own Way
Every organization has unique onboarding needs. There’s a key difference between the requirements of a tech firm and the needs of a retail organization. A tech firm may need to provide a very specific roadmap for new hires that includes elements such as its codebase and code standards, its communication tools, its chain of command and informational resources, a directory of manuals.
A retailer may need to get waves of new seasonal hires administratively processed in a hurry, than hold large orientation sessions to get them up and ready for the season. The tech firm may have no policies on dress code but the retailer has very specific requirements. Make sure you have all the bases covered for your industry, your company, and your culture.
Onboarding Functions: Which Does Your Company Need?
- Applicant and Hiring Info
- Screening Results
- Background Checks
- Benefits
- Compliance
- E-Verify
- Self-Service
- Mobile
- Automated
- HRIS Integration
- Payroll Integration
- LMS Integration
- Administration
- Documentation
- Tracking
- Reporting
- Delivery
- Training
- Self-Guided Experiences
- Policies and Procedures
- Safety Briefing
- Equipment Selection
- Facility Tour & Training
- Software Induction
- Engagement Check-Ins
- Advocacy Groups
- Team, Coworker, and Manager Communication
- Leadership Introductions
- Predictive Indicators
- Real-Time Updates
- 30, 60, 90 Day Check-Ins … and beyond
Onboarding doesn’t stop two weeks in. It’s ongoing.
Today, working means learning. It means continuously facing new challenges and new innovations that require us to adjust our thinking and improve our skills. Our skills and knowledge base are endlessly iterating. And that’s true for nearly every single employee.
So the question is: Why do we stop onboarding after a day, or a week? Why is onboarding confined to a sequence of static tasks, and then the employee is cut loose?
While conventional wisdom states that an employee should be up and running within 90 days, we know that’s not entirely true. It takes far more time to learn the norms and mores of the company; to develop a network that can help an individual employee navigate tasks and communications, and to gain the momentum, based on skills, fit, ease of interaction and confidence, to be fully productive.
That said, it probably takes about a year before an employee is firing on all cylinders. During this year, onboarding can help continue building engagement and supporting retention. It can continue supporting a sense of shared goals and alignment between employee and employer, another key driver of engagement and retention.
But it can only do it if it’s still part of the very operations and functions of work. If it’s a system of administration, support, communication and interaction that continues through the employee journey.
It’s been shown that employees whose companies have longer onboarding programs actually gain full proficiency far faster than those in the shortest programs.
Motivate New Hires to Engage
Any strategy designed to engage hires in their work starts with onboarding. It’s an opportunity to provide an awesome first impression of your company, internal teams, and culture — serving as an immediate validation for new and transitioning employees on their career decision. It also adds increasing value to the culture and employer, and is the first step to motivating employees.
How can onboarding be applied to intrinsically engage new hires? Companies can start by taking a step back and examining what employees need to feel engaged and satisfied with their work. SHRM found that respectful treatment of employees at all levels and fairness and openness were top contributors to employee satisfaction. With these factors in mind:
- Onboarding and training can help employees strive for improvement and to achieve maximum potential.
- Career development is a primary driver of employee satisfaction, and promoting internal mobility leads to better cross-functional communication and retention.
- Clear and open communication on the part of the employer and through onboarding instills a sense of trust.
- A a lack of communication when transitioning to a new team or department creates a bad employee experience and results in loss of productivity, engagement, and growth.
To provide lasting motivation, take a page from top-performing companies who consider the employee experience for the entire workforce at all stages from pre-hire to retire. Personalization, assigning mentors, providing check-in milestones, and showcasing success stories are just a few of the ways onboarding can borrow from the customer experience to further engage employees.
Conclusion
We have remarkable technologies and tools at our disposal now, from SaaS and Cloud-based platforms to mobile capabilities that help us better integrate our work and our lives. For organizations, this means no less than a transformation when it comes to onboarding.
As a way to continue our commitment to our people, modern onboarding supports constant communication and interaction, streamlines administrative tasks, and provides automated functionality. But doing this, even more importantly, it puts the employee front and center.
Today, providing a phenomenal employee experience is more critical than ever to supporting the incredible investment companies make into their workforces. With modern onboarding, we can reduce hit all the marks we need to as employers, and enable our employees to be happier, more successful, and more productive.
An Exceptional Onboarding Experience Is Easy To Create
The Click Boarding onboarding platform starts before day one with preboarding and boasts an easy-to-use interface that doesn’t require any complex training, certifications, or coding knowledge to use.
Employees get at-a-click information about company culture, job expectations, and the critical processes and procedures they need to feel comfortable and at home. With Click Boarding you’ll create exceptional onboarding by providing:
- Guided Experiences: A guided HR experience with cascading data that prevents redundant data entry
- Secure Platform: A secure, mobile-first experience so documents can be completed by employees on their preferred devices
- Easy & Accurate: Simplification of complex government forms so they can be completed more easily and with greater accuracy
- Centralized Access: A central location for important documents and easy form completion to help new hires feel supported
- Trackable & Taskable: The ability for administrators to track progress, assign tasks, and follow up with hires from a single place
- Personalized & Branded: An engaging and personalized experience to make new employees feel welcome and comfortable
