The importance of employee onboarding

Erik Fiala
Erik Fiala
Founder, CEO at Source
Feb 10, 2023
10 min read
Woman wearing a yellow and black plaid shirt

Onboarding is a crucial process for any company that wants to ensure a smooth integration of new hires into the organization. Despite its significance, many organizations overlook the importance of employee onboarding, leading to a lack of productivity, low employee morale, and high turnover rates. In this blog post, we'll discuss why employee onboarding is essential and how companies can make the most of the process.

Feeling valued

First and foremost, employee onboarding sets the tone for the employee's entire experience at the company. If a new hire feels welcomed, supported, and valued from the start, they are more likely to be productive and engaged in their work. On the other hand, if a new hire feels neglected or unsupported during their onboarding process, they may struggle to adjust to the company culture and may even look for opportunities elsewhere.

Company goals

In addition to creating a positive experience for the employee, a well-structured onboarding process can also help the company to achieve its goals. For instance, by providing new hires with the necessary tools, resources, and training, companies can help them to hit the ground running and make an impact from day one. Furthermore, a structured onboarding process can help to ensure that new hires understand the company's policies, procedures, and values, which is essential for maintaining consistency and avoiding misunderstandings down the line.

Planning

To make the most of the employee onboarding process, companies need to be intentional and thoughtful in their approach. This means taking the time to develop a comprehensive onboarding plan that addresses the specific needs and goals of both the employee and the organization. For example, the onboarding plan could include a mix of in-person training sessions, online resources, and hands-on experience.

Career development

Finally, it's important to remember that employee onboarding is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Companies should be prepared to continue to support new hires as they grow and develop within the organization. This could involve providing opportunities for professional development, offering feedback and coaching, and fostering a culture of collaboration and support.

Best employee onboarding software

1. Scribe

Scribe is a tool that streamlines the process for creating employee onboarding documents and makes it easy for new hires to find out how to do their jobs.

It’s a Chrome extension or desktop app that captures a workflow you want to document and turns it into step-by-step instructions and screenshots. For HR teams and hiring managers, gone are the days of pasting screenshots into Word documents – Scribe instantly creates these guides for your team.

These guides can be shared with individuals, made public to a team or company, or embedded in a help center or wiki.

Scribe’s extension is free with unlimited use. Its desktop recorder along with some other features, such as image redaction, are available with the Pro plan at $29/month per user.

Highlights:

  • Free Chrome extension
  • Instantly creates work instructions, SOPs, and other internal documents
  • Guides embed into knowledge base, wiki, project management tools, CMS
  • Instantly updated guides

2. Zelt

Zelt is an employee platform designed to help your team do great work. It offers everything they need, including pay, benefits, software, hardware, time off, feedback, and more. And it's all delivered in a user-centric, automated, and simple way that makes it easy for your team to access what they need.

They offer two tiers for any of their product modules with their basic tier being free to use and their more premium tier costing anywhere between $0 to $5 per user per month depending on the module.

Highlights:

  • Run payroll end-to-end in under 60 seconds
  • Integration between their payroll and payments module allows organizations to make all salary, pension, and HMRC payments in bulk and at once
  • Ability to automate the onboarding and offboarding process

3. BambooHR

BambooHR packs powerful onboarding capabilities behind a no-nonsense user interface. By no surprise, it is one of the most popular all-round HR solutions on the market.

The software allows you to leverage powerful features such as e-signatures and application tracking to create slick onboarding processes that your new employees (and your hiring managers) will love.

BambooHR is available in two tiers: ‘Essentials’ and ‘Advantage’.

Unfortunately, only the more expensive ‘Advantage’ package offers full onboarding functionality. Pricing is a quote based so contact the company to get a price tailored to your specific needs and budget.

Highlights:

  • Electronic signature software to complete paperwork for new hires more quickly
  • Custom workflows
  • Open API
  • 7-day free trial

4. Talmundo

Talmundo was built with the specific aim of revolutionizing the employee onboarding process.

One of the best things about this software is how fast to implement it is. Programming and customizing your employee’s roadmap is super straightforward so you’ll be up and running in no time.

What’s more, the interactive to-do lists and the fun quizzes do a great job of digitizing the onboarding process without losing the lovely human element.

Talmundo also offers valuable feedback and analytics that’ll help you identify sticking points across the onboarding cycle so you can remedy them quickly. Pricing is subscription-based - contact them directly to find the best rate.

Highlights:

  • Fun onboarding quizzes
  • Interactive to-do lists
  • Detailed analytics
  • Great customizability

5. Eddy

Eddy made the onboarding process completely paperless. All of your HR documents can be created, sent, signed, and stored 100% digitally helping to streamline the hiring and employee onboarding process.

What’s more is that Eddy makes it so intuitive, new employees can onboard themselves. Everything from creating their own Eddy profile to digitally signing documents can be done by the new hire on their own. That’s roughly 5 hours per new hire that you can spend elsewhere. Eddy also makes your new-hire onboarding tasks trackable. No-fuss, no awkward emails, just a silky smooth onboarding process.

Your new hire probably has little experience with your company other than interviews. There’s a lot about working with you that they don’t know. You can send them all of this info through Eddy before they come.

Highlights:

  • All-in-one HR platform
  • Specializes in deskless workers
  • Trackable task list
  • First day messaging

6. Zenefits

Zenefits is an HR platform that lets you manage processes such as hiring, onboarding, and employee records all in one place.

You’ll be able to design custom onboarding flows, send job offers, run background checks and let new hires complete their own onboarding before their first day of work.

The best part? All information is synched with payroll and benefits to ensure everything is up and running with just a few simple clicks. Pricing starts from $8/mo

Highlights:

  • All-in-one HR platform
  • Custom offer letters
  • Background checks
  • Easy sync with payroll

7. Click Boarding

Click Boarding is a purpose-built onboarding tool that creates memorable onboarding experiences that engage employees and provide them with the information they need to get off to a flying start.

The software comes loaded with pre-designed templates and content that let you set up your onboarding flow with ease. You can also go rogue and use the drag and drop builder to create your own flow, just the way you like it.

One of the best features is the ability to track employee progress through the onboarding flow, while seamless integration with most of the major HR software platforms is a breeze too.

Highlights:

  • Simple design
  • Easy to use
  • Manage employee progress
  • Nice offboarding feature

8. SageHR

SageHR is another all-in-one HR product that boasts impressive employee onboarding functionality.

The powerful workflow builder lets you create and automate onboarding tasks according to your own rules. At the same time, smart reporting lets you see each employee’s position in the onboarding flow.

Other features include a leave management tool, an expense tracker, and a recruitment solution. With flexible pricing starting at just $5.5/mo SageHR is certainly a tool you don’t want to overlook.

Highlights:

  • Reasonable pricing
  • Good onboarding templates
  • iOS & Android mobile apps
  • Slackbot integration

Conclusion

In conclusion, employee onboarding is a critical process that can have a profound impact on the success of both the employee and the company. By taking a strategic and supportive approach, companies can set their new hires up for success and create a positive and productive work environment. So, if you want to attract, retain, and develop top talent, invest in your employee onboarding process today!

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