As the war for talent rages, America’s employers are investing millions to attract and acquire the most highly skilled and qualified workers — and rightfully so. It’s trite but true that people make all the difference.
But talent acquisition is only half the battle. No one is productive right off the bat. Even the most qualified, skilled employees need time to find their footing. The onboarding period is crucial for ensuring an employee’s long-term success, productivity, and job satisfaction.
And yet, as the data attests, onboarding is where many organizations come up short. According to a Paychex survey of 1,000+ Americans who had started a new job within the previous year:
- Nearly half (48%) of all new hires feel dissatisfied with their onboarding experience.
- 32% of new hires find onboarding confusing, 24% say it is boring, and 22% say onboarding is disorganized.
- 52% of new hires feel undertrained for their roles; an additional 37% feel somewhat undertrained.
Related: Three Employee Onboarding Email Templates to Improve New Hire Onboarding. Read it here →
The Acquisition-Onboarding Disconnect
Experts often cite poor onboarding when explaining stunning statistics, such as that just 38% of new hires plan to stay at their organization beyond three years.
While companies roll out the red carpet to recruit top employees, they often leave employees to fend for themselves during onboarding. As a result, employees feel adrift, unprepared, and disconnected from company culture. This is a recipe for turnover.
Better Onboarding Through Technology
Helping new hires settle in and enabling them in their roles is no longer simply a matter of showing them around the office and introducing them to their supervisors and teammates. Fully remote and hybrid work has become commonplace, and many new employees now start their first day of work from their homes.
Further compounding the modern onboarding difficulty, job opportunities are plentiful in the current economy, and employers (younger employees, especially) are less reluctant to switch jobs. If onboarding does not go smoothly, some new hires will jump ship.
Yet, despite these challenges, creating and executing effective onboarding strategies is easier than before in at least one way. Digital technology brings organizations, teams, and individuals together across vast distances to communicate, collaborate, and learn. HR teams can lean on these technological tools to create efficient and inclusive onboarding processes that make new hires feel welcome and ready to do their jobs.
Here are three technologies to enhance your company’s onboarding program in 2025:
1. Personalized Video Introductions
It’s noteworthy that, when asked for the Paychex survey what elements would improve the onboarding process, new hires ranked “getting the team involved” and “creating an epic welcome” at the top.
Starting a new job can be exciting, but it’s also intimidating, like attending a party where you don’t know anyone. Will people be glad to see you? Will you fit in? How are you going to learn everyone’s names?
If you’ve ever entered a new group of people and immediately felt like “one of the gang,” you know the difference a warm welcome can make. New hires want to feel recognized by their new colleagues. They want reassurance that they chose the right workplace.
In-person, a breakroom get-together or other lighthearted gathering can help new employees break the ice. But for remote workers, personalized videos can express your team’s epic enthusiasm for their newest members.
One talent acquisition expert recommends creating a “virtual team welcome video,” attaching it to each new hire’s day-one agenda, and sending it to their personal and work email:
You can record it at the end of your weekly meeting with everyone on teams/zoom just saying “Good Morning—-NAME—-! Welcome to X Company! We look forward to connecting with you over the next few weeks. Have a great first day!
Video also makes an excellent training resource and can come as a breath of fresh air when new hires are drowning in written documents and manuals.
2. An Onboarding Microsite
From a new hire’s perspective, onboarding can be an organizational nightmare. Your first few days are jam-packed with presentations to watch, documents to read, and procedures to study, and somehow, you have to keep it all straight, all while absorbing new software systems, the workplace layout, the company hierarchy, and so on.
Amidst this flood of information and faces, it’s easy for some things to fall through the cracks. Onboarding microsites can help new hires gain some control over the chaos.
An onboarding microsite or portal is a central online repository of everything a new employee needs to navigate the workplace from day one. Personalized portals can be shared with remote, hybrid, or in-person employees to supplement or even replace the orientation meetings, handbooks, and email dumps typically used for onboarding.
Onboarding microsite sections often include:
- Benefits enrollment information
- Technology downloads and IT FAQs
- Key email addresses and phone numbers to know
- A guide to company culture
- The day-one (or week one, or month-one) schedule, personalized for each new hire
Tip: Build mobile-friendly onboarding microsites so your employees can access them from home, on the road, or wherever and whenever they need an information refresher.
3. A Project Management Tool
Most organizations these days use some form of project management software to assign tasks, designate resources, set deadlines, and monitor progress. However, not every organization understands that onboarding is itself a project that can be defined with specific and measurable milestones.
Breaking onboarding down into individual tasks this way serves both the new hire and the employer. The employer gains insight into each new hire’s readiness for work. For new hires, a project-oriented approach makes onboarding less overwhelming, and they gain a satisfying sense of accomplishment as they reach each milestone.
When setting onboarding goals, avoiding vague or out-of-reach expectations is critical. Employees should feel that each objective chains together in a natural progression.
(We recommend setting SMART goals for onboarding: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Read more about using SMART goals for employee onboarding plans here.)
Make Better Onboarding a Priority in 2025
With so much focus on finding and hiring the right people, onboarding can sometimes feel like an afterthought. According to this research survey, only 41% of HR leaders prioritize onboarding.
But there’s a strong argument for giving onboarding and talent acquisition equal weight. Properly onboarded employees are more productive, satisfied, engaged and tend to stay with their employers longer.
If your company struggles with retention or low morale, look at your onboarding program. The three technological solutions discussed above can help ensure all your new hires start work on the right foot.
Get even more like this in our Onboarding Toolkit
Download our Onboarding Toolkit to get a free three new hire onboarding templates, an onboarding plan timeline, with nine key touchpoints, a checklist with 24 items to include in an employee onboarding portal, 3 unique ideas for improving your onboarding, and more!