evaluating and refining: how to improve your onboarding process.

Your onboarding process for new hires is an essential business activity — without proper onboarding, new recruits take longer to become productive and are more likely to leave the company early.

That's why you shouldn’t see onboarding as a one-off HR initiative. In order to truly create a solid foundation of success for new hires, the process needs to grow and evolve over time as the needs of your company change.

In this article, we’ll cover some key onboarding best practices to improve your process and ensure that each new hire gets a better onboarding than the one before them.

identify your onboarding metrics — and start measuring them

You always need a reliable way to measure your success when trying to improve something, and onboarding is no exception. When you’ve decided to actively start enhancing your process, measure these onboarding statistics — you don’t need any specialized tools or knowledge to get started, and they will give insights into how welcoming and effective your onboarding is:

• new hire turnover — Most experienced HR professionals can confirm that a large share of employee turnover occurs in the first year. Studies and surveys have come to different results, but most put the new hire turnover rate at somewhere between 30 to 50 percent. In certain industries or roles, the bulk of turnover may even occur within the first month.

High turnover rates among new hires isn’t always caused by poor onboarding — an employee can still go through a great onboarding process but choose to leave the company for personal reasons. However, onboarding that doesn’t make the new hire feel welcome and confident in their new role is likely to contribute to earlier turnover.

Keep an eye on the turnover rate of all your new hires during the first year,  and try to break down the figures by department, role, or manager. This will help you identify the weak points in onboarding across the organization. 

• employee engagement — Engagement can be hard to measure, but there’s a few indicators. High rates of absenteeism, declines in performance or output, or falling scores on employee satisfaction surveys can all be caused by declining levels of engagement. Engagement levels should be measured across the workforce, especially when the share of employees planning to switch jobs in the next 6 months is growing (according to the 2024 Randstad Employer Brand Report). But if engagement is suffering among your new hires, issues in the onboarding process could be to blame.

• onboarding satisfaction — Obviously, you can also measure onboarding satisfaction by asking new hires directly. This is the most straightforward way of gauging the quality of your onboarding process! However, it’s not always guaranteed to give accurate results — particularly if their responses are not anonymous. Use these direct results along with the other onboarding metrics to get a well-rounded picture of the quality of your process.

ask employees in a new hire onboarding survey

No matter the size of your organization, a short employee onboarding survey is simple to set up and provides unbeatable insights. Just remember these tips to keep your results accurate:

• Keep the survey as consistent as possible — Changing the survey slightly over time as your onboarding process evolves is inevitable. Certain employees may also get different questions — for example, remote workers have different onboarding expectations than on-site staff. However, you should aim to ask the same questions to each new hire, and send the survey at the same time — for example, five weeks after starting. This ensures you can reliably compare the results over time and get a better picture of how the changes to your onboarding process are working.
   
• Think carefully about your new hire onboarding survey questions — Creating onboarding survey questions for new hires that give accurate results is tricky. For the best balance of comparable responses and personal insight, mix closed and open-ended questions. For example, asking new hires to rate their overall onboarding satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, but also asking them to list the high points of their first week on the job.
   
• Consider your survey format — The onboarding survey is important, and it’s a great opportunity to get feedback — but no-one wants to spend time filling in a complex survey with hundreds of questions. Try to keep it short by sticking to the most vital aspects — or mix it up by replacing your single onboarding survey with several short pulse surveys, sent throughout the onboarding process. With only a handful of questions in each, these small surveys allow you to finely tailor your questions to each stage of the onboarding process and can reveal its weak points.

share the feedback and communicate your onboarding successes

Even though team members from across the company should be involved in onboarding, the HR department is the owner of the process. However, that doesn’t mean insights into the effectiveness of the onboarding should be kept within HR. To really start improving the process, the feedback needs to go to the managers and colleagues that new hires spend the bulk of their onboarding interacting with. 

• Ensure managers are aware of the importance of onboarding — A well-built, standardized onboarding process can boost new hire productivity by 62% and retention by 50%, as reported in Harvard Business Review — so managers who see themselves as too busy to really engage in the onboarding process should understand the business case for introducing new hires properly.
• Share your improvements — Once you’ve started tracking new hire onboarding metrics, you’ll be able to see when they improve — for example, when retention rates start to increase. Don’t assume the rest of the organization will notice this. Instead, work to actively share it through your communication channels. Each improvement on the onboarding process will have direct effects on your bottom line.
• Take concrete steps to fix issues — When tracking your onboarding success, monitor the departments and managers that seem to return the lowest-performing metrics and work to make things better. The saying ‘people leave managers, not companies’ is overused, but it may have some truth in it — a survey from management consulting firm DDI found that over half of respondents had quit at least one job because of a manager. Your efforts to gather information from new hires about the reality of your onboarding process will be wasted if you don’t put it to use when working with the leaders who are taking on new staff.

get control of your onboarding process, from beginning to end

If you’re at the stage where you want to start improving your onboarding, it could be time to review the entire process, from start to finish. To get started, download our onboarding checklist — it provides a basic structure for a new hire’s first weeks and months at the company, and helps you remember all the vital steps on your way to a better onboarding.

Click below to download it in Excel format, and feel free to adjust and build on it as your onboarding process evolves.