A catalyst for success: The impact of onboarding software on the new hire experience

If you’ve ever assembled a piece of boxed furniture, you know that clear guidance (and moral support) is key to your success. The same is true of employee onboarding, but outdated practices and unclear processes often lead to confusion and disengagement. This can hinder promising new hires from reaching their full potential—or worse, lead them back out the door.

Onboarding software helps you alleviate your HR and management team’s workload and promotes a faster time to productivity for new hires. It also allows you to get more team members involved in the process and creates a smoother takeoff all around.

Let’s dig into what onboarding software is, how it can help alleviate common challenges, and the benefits it provides for your business.

What is onboarding software? A brief overview

Onboarding software is a digital tool that supports a smoother ramp-up for new hires joining your company. These platforms offer features like personalized onboarding plans, automated workflows, centralized assets, and integrations with other HR systems. Some also provide tools specifically for reboarding employees returning from leaves or cross-boarding employees when they switch roles or get promoted.

Onboarding platforms help you kick old-school methods to the curb and provide a more modern and agile onboarding experience for new hires. But not all of them are built the same—for example, what sets Workleap Onboarding apart is that it’s:

• Simple and low-touch: Set it and forget it—the system’s smart automations take over tedious (yet essential) admin tasks like scheduling meetings.
• Collaborative and current: Interactive and engaging for the modern worker, with built-in video recording and participation options for various team members.
• Ready to connect: Integrations with key HR systems like BambooHR, ADP, HiBob, and other HRIS keep employee data well-managed and reduce app-switching.
• Self-serve and fuss-free: Easy to get set up independently and intuitive to navigate, with support available when you need it.
• Available free, forever: Small teams and businesses can benefit from onboarding software without breaking the bank.

But before we go too much deeper into it, let’s explore some of the challenges businesses currently face with traditional onboarding methods.

The challenges of traditional onboarding

Traditional onboarding practices tend to consist of piles of paperwork, outdated slide decks, and awkward intro meetings. While some companies see this as ‘good enough’, a better alternative exists—and sticking it out can lead to some serious consequences, like:

• Disengagement occurs because employees don’t build a connection with the company mission, their teammates, or their role. (Extra challenging for hybrid and remote companies!)
• Information overload leads to ineffective knowledge transfer because it’s hard to parse out what’s important and what’s not.
• Tedious administrative tasks take up precious time, and employees are busy creating accounts rather than learning about the company.
• Managers and HR staff also get bogged down in the busy work, shuffling through folders instead of showing up to support their new team members.
• Documentation isn’t kept up to date or organized, and new hires end up referring to retired processes or policies.
• Nothing changes because there’s no feedback system in place to guide your efforts to improve the onboarding process.

How an employee starts their time at your company has a big impact on their long-term success, engagement, satisfaction, and retention.

Onboarding software can help you create a more cohesive, modern, and engaging welcome for new staff joining your team. While it’s true that new work tools can come with an adjustment period, the payoff of onboarding software is totally worth it.

4 key benefits of onboarding software

Here are just a few of the major benefits that come with implementing onboarding software at your business:

1. Streamlining administrative tasks

For new employees, hiring managers, and your HR team alike, the automation that onboarding software offers is a game changer. These platforms can alleviate the grunt work of managing documents, scheduling time, and knowing what to tackle next. By taking on the admin tasks it gives everyone the space to focus on those crucial human interactions that make the difference between a good first few weeks and a great first few weeks on the job.

These all make time-consuming manual work a thing of the past. Your new hires can focus on settling into their role, managers can be more present for their team, and your HR department will be on the ball with more strategic initiatives.

2. Personalizing the onboarding journey

Every new joiner has a specific role, a specialized skill set, and individual goals and objectives. Generic onboarding flows can feel disconnected from someone’s personal perspective and place within your organization. Onboarding software helps you custom-tailor each employee’s experience, showing them that you recognize what makes them unique.

Factors like this establish you as an employer who understands the value of each employee and trusts them to be autonomous. Plus, it helps new hires see a future with your company, which makes people more likely to stick around in the long run.

3. Enhancing engagement and connectivity

You can create a more engaging onboarding experience by adding interactive training modules and other dynamic elements in new hire workflows. This is especially powerful for remote employee onboarding and fostering connections among distributed workers. An onboarding platform can become like a community hub, giving new employees a clear space to interact with their team, manager, and collaborators.

These elements make for a more human and interesting experience. It’s easy to feel disconnected when you’re not in a room with people, and creating a virtual social space helps new hires feel like they’re part of the team.

4. Continuous feedback and adaptation

What’s better than a well-crafted onboarding program? One that evolves over time and gets better with each iteration. Onboarding software helps you collect feedback from new hires about their experience, providing you with crucial insights into what’s working well and where there’s opportunities for improvement.

You can rely on the clear and comprehensive reports provided in the platform not just to help you measure your onboarding process but also to inform its evolution. That way, you won’t have to do a major overhaul down the line because you’ll be fine-tuning it consistently.

How Lexop modernized its onboarding with Workleap Onboarding

Fintech startup Lexop recently found itself struggling to keep up with the demands of its manual onboarding process during a period of rapid growth. Personalizing onboarding plans for each new hire and crafting an engaging remote onboarding experience was taking too much precious time away from hiring managers and their people ops team.

Not wanting to sacrifice an exceptional experience for new employees, Lexop turned to Workleap Onboarding for support. Some of the top features that strengthened their onboarding process were:

• Customizable onboarding plan templates to speed up planning
• Video requests to gather custom intros from multiple team members
• Automated notifications and reminders to keep everyone in the loop

Workleap Onboarding made for an easier process among the HR team, but also an improved experience for new hires:

Onboarding software gets new hires up to speed—quickly

If you want your employees to achieve their highest potential and help you outperform the competition, it’s essential to give them a rock-solid onboarding experience. Onboarding software streamlines your workflow and helps foster clarity, alignment, and connection. This builds engagement and trust early on, empowering new hires to do their best work.

To experience the power of onboarding software first-hand, book a free demo of Workleap Onboarding. We’ll be happy to walk you through the features that will impact your team the most and help you see how the right tool can transform your onboarding process!