Onboarding Best Practices: Maximizing the Use of Employee Onboarding Software

Successful onboarding does far more than introduce a new employee to their role. It shapes their early experience with the organization and has a direct impact on engagement, productivity, and long term retention.

As more companies turn to digital tools and platforms like HiringThing to streamline hiring and onboarding workflows, understanding best practices for onboarding software has become essential for building a confident and productive workforce.

Summary

Every new job begins with a moment of anticipation. A new employee signs an offer letter, prepares for the first day, and begins imagining what their future inside the organization might look like. Those early moments matter more than many companies realize because the onboarding experience forms the foundation of an employee’s relationship with their workplace.

When onboarding is thoughtful and organized, employees begin their roles with confidence and clarity. When onboarding feels rushed or confusing, new hires may start their jobs with doubts about whether they made the right decision. Organizations that invest time and resources into onboarding consistently see stronger engagement and better long term results across their teams.

Research consistently reinforces this idea. Effective onboarding can increase employee retention by as much as 82 percent. It can also improve new hire productivity by up to 70 percent while raising employee engagement levels by more than 30 percent. These outcomes show that onboarding is not simply a formality but a strategic step in building a strong workforce.

Onboarding/Workforce Data

• Great onboarding increases employee retention by 82% and increases retention for new hires by 52%.
• Organizations with effective employee onboarding have an average of 33% higher employee engagement.
• Good onboarding correlates with up to a 70% increase in new hire productivity.

In the modern workplace, many organizations rely on employee onboarding software to help manage this process. Digital onboarding systems help HR teams manage documentation, communication, training resources, and compliance requirements in a structured environment. When these tools are implemented thoughtfully, companies create a smoother experience for both employees and hiring teams.

Organizations that build their hiring processes around modern platforms such as the HiringThing applicant tracking system often see this benefit clearly. HiringThing is known for helping organizations manage hiring workflows from the first candidate interaction through the employee onboarding experience. By connecting recruiting and onboarding together, companies can create a continuous and consistent hiring journey that feels organized from beginning to end.

Why Employee Onboarding Software Is Becoming Essential

Traditional onboarding often involved large stacks of paperwork and disconnected processes that slowed everyone down. HR professionals spent hours collecting forms, entering data into multiple systems, and confirming that compliance requirements had been completed. While these tasks were necessary, they often consumed valuable time that could have been spent helping employees adjust to their new roles.

Manual onboarding also created opportunities for mistakes. Missing documents, delayed approvals, or incorrect information could slow the process and create frustration for both HR teams and new hires. Even small administrative issues could create a poor first impression for employees who were still forming opinions about their new workplace.

These challenges become even more significant as organizations grow and hire more employees. Hiring teams may need to onboard employees across multiple departments, locations, or time zones. Without a structured system, it becomes difficult to maintain consistency and ensure that every employee receives the same quality experience.

Employee onboarding software addresses these challenges by centralizing the entire process in one place. Digital systems guide employees through required tasks while automatically organizing documentation and tracking completion. Instead of managing multiple spreadsheets and email threads, HR teams rely on structured workflows that ensure nothing is overlooked.

Solutions like HiringThing demonstrate how onboarding can be integrated into the broader hiring lifecycle. HiringThing offers tools that help employers manage applicant tracking, hiring workflows, and onboarding activities in a single platform. This integrated approach reduces friction between recruiting and onboarding while helping organizations maintain a consistent candidate and employee experience.

Best Practices for Maximizing Employee Onboarding Software

Technology alone does not guarantee a successful onboarding program. The true value of onboarding software emerges when organizations apply thoughtful strategies that support employees throughout their transition into a new role. By following several proven best practices, companies can maximize the effectiveness of their onboarding tools and create a more meaningful experience for new hires.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

Automation is one of the most valuable capabilities within modern onboarding software. Many administrative steps in the onboarding process follow predictable patterns such as sending documents, collecting signatures, assigning training materials, and reminding employees to complete required tasks.

When these activities are handled manually, HR teams spend significant time performing repetitive work. Automation reduces this burden by allowing systems to complete these tasks automatically. Structured workflows can trigger emails, deliver documentation, and track progress without constant oversight.

Automation also improves accuracy across the organization. Digital workflows reduce the chances of missed steps or incomplete documentation. Every employee follows the same structured onboarding path, which helps ensure consistency and fairness across departments.

Examples of onboarding tasks that benefit from automation include:

• Sending offer letters and employment agreements
• Distributing tax and compliance forms
• Assigning onboarding checklists to employees and managers
• Sending reminders for incomplete tasks
• Delivering orientation materials and company resources

Platforms such as HiringThing provide automation tools that help HR teams streamline these activities. HiringThing allows organizations to create automated workflows that guide employees through the onboarding process while keeping hiring managers informed about progress. This approach allows HR professionals to focus more on people rather than paperwork.

Maintain Strong Compliance Processes

Compliance plays a critical role in onboarding. Every employee must complete specific legal documentation before beginning work. This often includes tax forms, identity verification, workplace policies, and industry specific certifications.

Tracking these requirements manually can become difficult for organizations that hire frequently. Missing or incomplete documentation can create legal risks and administrative challenges. A well structured onboarding system helps ensure that every required document is completed correctly and stored securely.

Onboarding software allows organizations to embed compliance directly into the workflow. Employees are guided through required forms step by step, which reduces confusion and improves completion rates. Digital storage ensures that documentation is organized and accessible whenever it is needed.

Important compliance elements often managed within onboarding systems include:

• Tax forms and employment eligibility documentation
• Digital policy acknowledgments
• Workplace safety agreements
• Confidentiality or non disclosure agreements
• Certification tracking for regulated industries

HiringThing’s onboarding capabilities support these needs by allowing organizations to collect and store employment documentation digitally. With HiringThing, employers can ensure that important forms are completed before an employee’s start date while maintaining secure records for compliance purposes.

Personalize the Onboarding Experience

Not every employee has the same responsibilities or training needs. A single standardized onboarding program often fails to provide the information employees truly need to succeed in their roles. Personalization allows organizations to tailor onboarding workflows based on department, job function, or location.

Role specific onboarding ensures that employees receive relevant training materials and guidance from the beginning. A marketing employee may need access to brand guidelines and campaign tools, while a technical employee may require system access and specialized documentation. Personalized workflows help employees quickly find the resources they need.

Many onboarding platforms allow HR teams to create different templates for various roles. When a candidate becomes an employee, the system automatically assigns the appropriate onboarding workflow. This approach helps ensure that every employee receives the most relevant information without being overwhelmed by unnecessary materials.

Examples of personalized onboarding elements include:

• Department specific training modules
• Role based task checklists
• Customized welcome messages from team leaders
• Equipment setup instructions
• Introductions to relevant colleagues or mentors

HiringThing enables organizations to create flexible onboarding workflows that align with different hiring needs. Because HiringThing is designed with hiring teams in mind, it allows employers to transition candidates directly from the applicant tracking stage into a personalized onboarding process.

Integrate Onboarding With Other HR Systems

Many organizations rely on multiple technology platforms to manage different aspects of HR operations. Recruiting systems track candidates, payroll systems manage compensation, and HR databases store employee records. When these systems operate independently, data must often be entered multiple times.

Duplicate data entry wastes time and increases the likelihood of errors. Information collected during recruiting should ideally flow directly into onboarding systems and employee records. Integration between platforms makes this possible and greatly improves efficiency.

When onboarding software integrates with other HR systems, employee information moves automatically between platforms. Recruiting data can populate onboarding workflows, while completed onboarding forms can update employee records. This seamless transfer reduces administrative work and improves accuracy.

Key benefits of system integration include:

• Eliminating redundant data entry
• Improving accuracy across systems
• Accelerating the transition from candidate to employee
• Simplifying HR reporting and analytics
• Creating a unified hiring and onboarding process

HiringThing helps organizations achieve this integration by combining applicant tracking and onboarding within one platform. Employers can manage job postings, candidate evaluations, hiring decisions, and onboarding tasks in a single environment. This unified workflow reduces complexity and allows hiring teams to maintain momentum from recruitment through onboarding.

Gather Feedback and Improve the Process

Even the most carefully designed onboarding programs benefit from employee feedback. New hires experience onboarding from a fresh perspective that often reveals opportunities for improvement. Their insights can help HR teams refine the process over time.

Many organizations rarely ask employees about their onboarding experience, which means valuable feedback is often missed. Companies that actively gather input from new hires gain valuable information that helps them strengthen onboarding programs.

Feedback can be collected at several points during the onboarding journey. Early surveys help identify immediate challenges while later conversations provide insight into long term adjustments. Managers can also share observations about how well employees adapt to their new roles.

Common feedback methods include:

• Post onboarding surveys
• First week check in meetings
• Thirty day and ninety day employee feedback forms
• Manager observations about onboarding effectiveness

Organizations that actively seek feedback demonstrate that they value employee perspectives. This approach strengthens employee relationships and encourages continuous improvement across hiring and onboarding practices.

Emphasize Clear Communication

Communication plays a central role throughout the onboarding process. New employees receive a large amount of information during their first days, which can easily become overwhelming if it is not presented clearly.

Onboarding software helps organize communication by providing a central place where employees can access instructions, documents, and schedules. Instead of searching through email threads or scattered files, employees follow a structured path that guides them through each step.

Effective onboarding communication often includes:

• Clear first day instructions
• Orientation schedules and training timelines
• Contact information for HR and managers
• Explanations of company policies and expectations
• Regular updates about onboarding milestones

Platforms like HiringThing help employers centralize these communications within the hiring and onboarding workflow. By keeping information organized in one place, HiringThing helps employees navigate their early days with greater clarity and confidence.

Align Recruiting With Onboarding Expectations

Successful onboarding begins long before the first day of work. The recruiting process shapes employee expectations about their role and responsibilities. If these expectations are unclear during hiring, employees may feel disappointed once they begin their jobs.

Organizations can prevent this issue by aligning recruiting and onboarding strategies. Hiring managers should clearly explain job responsibilities during interviews. Onboarding programs should then reinforce those expectations through training, documentation, and conversations with managers.

When recruiting and onboarding are aligned, employees experience a smooth transition from candidate to team member. Hiring platforms such as HiringThing support this alignment by connecting applicant tracking workflows directly with onboarding processes. This connection ensures that information collected during hiring carries forward into the onboarding experience.

Measure Onboarding Performance

Organizations that want to improve onboarding must measure its effectiveness. Tracking onboarding performance helps HR teams understand how well their process supports employee success. Data can reveal whether new hires are adapting quickly or encountering obstacles.

Important onboarding metrics often include:

• Time to productivity for new employees
• Completion rates for onboarding tasks
• Employee satisfaction with onboarding
• Early employee retention rates
• Manager feedback on new hire readiness

Hiring platforms that include analytics tools can help organizations evaluate these metrics more effectively. HiringThing provides reporting capabilities that allow employers to analyze hiring and onboarding performance across the organization.

The Five Building Blocks of Meaningful Onboarding

Software makes onboarding efficient, but the program it runs still needs a solid strategy behind it. According to SHRM, every successful onboarding process rests on four building blocks: compliance, clarification, culture and connection. We add a fifth, consistency. Before you design any of them, start with your goals.

Start With Your Onboarding Goals

To establish your onboarding strategy and meaningfully track its success, it’s crucial to determine your goals. What’s most important to your business goals? Is it getting new employees to show up the first day, retaining them for one year, creating a more productive workforce, upping engagement, or saving time? Remember that you can have multiple goals, but it’s important to establish and rank them so you can set KPIs and measure the effectiveness of your strategy. 

• What are the goals of your onboarding strategy?
• When will your onboarding start? How long will it last? HiringThing Pro Tip: Start onboarding during recruiting. 
• What tasks and takeaways are non-negotiables for new hires to complete and come away with when they accept an offer and start their new role?
• What impression do you want new hires to walk away with at the end of their first day? What must happen to achieve this desired outcome? 
• What are the top 5 things new employees need to know about your company culture and work environment? 
• What stakeholders should participate in the onboarding process? What resources will each of these people need? 
• What kind of goals will you set for your new employees? HiringThing Pro Tip: 60% of companies don’t set goals or milestones for their new hires—set yourself apart by having potential employees outline goals as part of their hiring process (or providing them with a list of what you expect them to achieve by when). 
• How will you gather feedback on your program and measure its success? 

Compliance

Employees must understand basic legal and policy-driven rules and regulations and are, in fact, legally able to perform their roles for your organization (and submit the required paperwork, rendering them legally able to do so).

Frontload the paperwork at the start of the onboarding process to ensure the new employees can devote the bulk of their attention to compliance training and other aspects of onboarding. This will also give your HR professionals time to double-check and process the paperwork.

Clarification

Part of onboarding’s role is to clarify what is expected of new employees. Good onboarding means that an organization preemptively answers new hires' questions about their role. 

Good onboarding means that new hires should clearly understand their role, expectations, company values, responsibilities, and practical processes, like where to go for IT help or who can help them replace a lost name tag. 

HiringThing ProTip: As part of the job application, ask candidates which specific duties they’ll excel at and, optionally, which duties they may need additional training to master. Ensure they know this isn’t a way to weed them out but to support them once they come on board. 

Map Out Progression

A good way to clarify what new employees should know is to map out a timeline of what they should master and when. What should new employees understand on their first day? First week? Master within the first 6 weeks? 6 Months? Year? We’d encourage all organizations to map out timelines that work for their roles—a seasonal position doesn’t need a year check-in, for example—and be as transparent as possible with them. Put them in job descriptions. Discuss them during the interview process. Provide them in a concrete form—digital or paper, depending on the work environment— for new employees on their first day.

Preview the Role Accurately

Giving your potential employee a realistic idea of what their job will be like is essential to a solid onboarding process.

SHRM calls this a realistic job preview (RJP).

While you may drive away some potential candidates, you will ensure the quality of those who pursue the job after seeing what it is really like. An unnamed firm discovered interesting results after conducting an experiment where one group of candidates was given a Realistic Job Preview, and the other group was not. SHRM reported that in this firm, “The RJP group was more likely to reject a job offer, but they had 50% less turnover than the non-RJP group.”

Some ways to ensure you realistically preview said job include: 

• Writing clear job descriptions that provide a clear, concrete list of responsibilities and expectations. 
• Being transparent about your hiring process and how long each step will take. Likewise, being transparent about how onboarding will occur. 
• Answering questions about your organization openly and honestly. 
• Not selling your organization and company as perfect. Be open about challenges.

Culture

Company culture is often one of the toughest—but most important—aspects of an organization for a new hire to learn and navigate, which is why it’s one of the core four components of good onboarding. 

Your employees must understand your organization’s mission, values, and working environment. Forward-thinking companies will also consider new employees as tools for growth, ensuring they know you welcome positive changes and contributions. 

New employees need to have at least a basic understanding of the company's history (one piece of history many organizations overlook is the evolution of a department). We suggest including this on a career page, in your job description, and relevant portions of the hiring process. 

The company mission should be reiterated at every step of the interview process so that new hires start their first day with a strong sense of what the company aims to do. 

HiringThing Pro Tip: Have all current employees share what the company mission means to them and compile them in content—a blog, video, etc.—and then ask job candidates how they feel they can add/enhance the company mission. 

Connection

The final component for SHRM's onboarding is building solid connections and networking opportunities. This will help new employees acclimate faster and enhance creativity and productivity for your entire organization. 

A strong offer letter drives a 17x more emotional connection to a company for new employees. That’s huge. If possible, personalize offer letters; if that’s not scalable, do your best to imbue them with a sense of belonging and excitement about bringing your new employees aboard.  

Team Structure

New hires should know their manager's name, understand the company hierarchy on a high level, and know the names and positions of the team they’ll interact with daily before their first day.

HiringThing Pro Tip: Include as many of the candidates' team as possible in the hiring process--starting a new role, already being able to say “I know that person” goes a long way in making a new employee feel accepted (you can also encourage teammates to reach out to new hires in an informal way!). 

Make New Hires Feel Welcome

A new hire shouldn’t feel nervous or apprehensive on their first day. You want your new hires to feel welcome and comfortable in their new environments—research shows that’s when you get the best work. 

HiringThing Pro Tip: Send new hires a welcome package showing them how excited you are for them to join the team. This could be some coffee or company mug, or simply a personalized note/email from a manager letting the new hire know they’re valued before they start.

Consistency

A formal onboarding with planned and executed steps works better than an informal onboarding process. Standardization ensures every step is complete, best practices remain constant despite employees moving around the organization, and results can be measured and changed.

HiringThing ProTip: List the formal steps of your onboarding process somewhere all stakeholders can easily access.

How to Onboard Remote Employees

Onboarding can pose unique challenges to remote employees, especially those working remotely for the first time.  Here are a few ways to create a successful onboarding process for remote employees:

Use the Right Technology

Content-heavy emails will not provide the effective onboarding process new employees desire. Create a more personal experience, giving them plenty of opportunities to ask questions and respond to feedback in real-time. You may need to conduct long video meetings or use additional technology to discuss procedures, expectations, and goals. This will help you distribute information quickly and in full detail and allow your employees to ask questions almost immediately.

Set Your Expectations from the Very Beginning

If you want your remote employees to establish schedules or be available during certain business hours, be sure your expectations are clear from the beginning. They need to know what you expect of them and what matters most to you and the company. For example, if you care little about when the work is accomplished and more about the quality, relay that information. Your employees need to know how to succeed on the job.

Provide Follow-Up After Several Days on Their Own

Don’t expect your employees to succeed immediately after onboarding training. They will likely have many questions and concerns after working on their own for a few days. Schedule a time to follow up with them. Discuss their performance, listen to any concerns, and be willing to answer questions about processes, projects, and other issues. This is also a good time to address any poor habits you notice or concerns you have before employees become too invested.

Let Employees Ease into Their Positions

It’s tempting to give employees full workloads right after onboarding training. Unfortunately, this can quickly overwhelm employees. Finding a balance between working remotely and managing home life can be challenging, and with enough pressure, employees may leave. Give them time to adjust and develop a routine. Start by assigning just a few projects, then slowly add more. This will also help them learn what you expect, and if revisions are needed, they won’t receive an overwhelming amount of revisions all at once.

Most importantly, offer praise and let new hires know when they are doing good work. Remote work offers flexibility, but it can also bring isolation, the need for increased self-discipline, and other unique elements. Proper training, follow-ups, and ample praise will go a long way in retaining your employees and helping them succeed.

Onboarding Software For You

A user-first designed onboarding experience has lasting impact on employees and organizations. Employees who begin their roles feeling supported and informed are more likely to remain engaged with their work. They build stronger relationships with their colleagues and become productive members of their teams more quickly.

Employee onboarding software helps organizations create this experience by organizing complex processes and reducing administrative burdens. When combined with thoughtful strategies such as automation, personalization, and clear communication, these tools can transform onboarding into a structured and welcoming journey.

Organizations that adopt integrated hiring platforms like HiringThing often discover that connecting recruiting and onboarding leads to a more consistent experience for both candidates and employees. By managing the entire hiring lifecycle in one system, companies can create smoother transitions and stronger first impressions.

Strong onboarding sets the tone for long term success. When employees feel confident during their first days, they are more likely to grow, contribute, and remain committed to the organization for years to come.

About HiringThing 

HiringThing is a modern recruiting and employee onboarding platform as a service that creates seamless talent experiences. Our white label solutions and open API enable HR technology and service providers to offer hiring and onboarding to their clients. Approachable and adaptable, the HiringThing HR platform empowers anyone, anywhere to build their dream team.