4 Reasons to Automate Employee Onboarding Process: Boost Retention & Save Costs

When it comes to testing out a software program, both automatic and manual testing can be performed by a business's engineers. This testing helps to see how the software reacts to various factors and scenarios. Some of the most common types of testing on software include network testing, integration testing, smoke testing, and regression testing.

What is Employee Onboarding Automation?

Employee onboarding automation is a system that delivers personalized training collateral and modules via customized apps or dashboards, automatically generates paperwork and contracts for signatures, and reduces repetitive clerical tasks with pre-populated forms. It augments human resources by customizing employee onboarding training and experiences while increasing HR efficiency. A comprehensive onboarding system with accurately completed documentation by human resources professionals ensures new hires are acclimated adequately to workflow and procedures, with no costly interruptions. The global human capital management software(HCM) market revenue surpassed $26 billion in 2023, providing lucrative opportunities for skilled developers to capture market share and optimize software performance.

Why Should You Automate the Employee Onboarding Process?

Automating employee onboarding and recruitment ensures stringent standards are communicated to candidates, with accurate quality control procedures to provide all candidates equal training and opportunities to evolve into productive team members. Automating employee onboarding increases efficiency, eliminates repetitive tasks such as manual data entry, and ensures compliance in real-time to facilitate fully optimized workflows.

Society for Human Resource Management reported searching and onboarding new candidates can cost $7500-$28,000 in hard costs, including digital job board fees, background checks, and other processing expenses. Additionally, Gartner reports successful onboarding strategies increase employee performance by 15%. With the significant costs for onboarding new candidates, can your business afford to lose qualified candidates due to incorrect onboarding processes?

4 Key Reasons to Automate Your Onboarding Process

There are many reasons for companies to consider automating their onboarding processes. Here are four of the primary reasons companies should consider implementing an automated process.

1) Efficient Onboarding Improves Employee Retention

One of the most important advantages of automating your employee onboarding process is that doing so can help to increase your employee retention rates. When companies are able to retain a higher percentage of their employees, they will save money, resources, and time that they would otherwise have to spend on recruitment efforts.

Despite the fact that a strong employee onboarding process is important, many companies do not have an established process for how newly hired employees are handled. This leads to many professionals looking for new jobs within months of being hired and to higher turnover rates.

Good onboarding can help to build teams that help businesses to thrive. When you automate the process, it helps to eliminate human error when new accounts are established or when contracts are sent and tracked. However, automation involves more than simply reducing the number of administrative tasks and paperwork. It also helps companies to engage candidates after they have accepted job offers.

Automated onboarding can allow the behind-the-scenes processes to be seamless so that human resources professionals can concentrate on engaging their newly hired employees. Welcoming and including new employees makes them feel like they are part of the organization. When employees feel like the onboarding process is effective, they are more prone to be committed to their organization and its goals. Streamlining the onboarding process through automation can help companies to retain their key employees for much longer.

2) Onboarding Automation Reduces Costs

Reducing costs is a key goal of many business owners and corporate executives. Onboarding automation helps to lower organizational costs by reducing how many workers are required to input new employee data. Reducing the number of administrative work hours can save a significant amount of money for an organization. Newly hired employees can also start working and become productive more quickly. Onboarding automation can also help to save money on paper. While companies might hesitate to spend money on new software, the return on investment from onboarding automation makes the investment worthwhile.

3) Increase Productivity with Onboarding Automation

Automation does not replace the people who welcome newly hired employees. Instead, onboarding automation enhances and complements the efforts of human resource professionals to welcome new employees.

On average, a new employee will have to complete as many as 54 tasks during employee onboarding. They might have to set up new IT accounts, email accounts, and cloud storage accounts. They might also have to attend meetings and participate in various training sessions. If human error is introduced during this process, it can quickly throw a newly hired employee off and lead to confusion.

Since technology constantly changes, new systems, software, and apps require an onboarding process to be regularly updated. Automating your company's onboarding process can help to keep everything current.

Onboarding automation helps to increase the productivity of new employees. Employees who do not receive effective onboarding are much less likely to feel confident in their abilities to perform in their new positions. By contrast, those who do undergo effective onboarding will feel more confident in their abilities much earlier, allowing them to be more productive.

The process of onboarding new employees should extend beyond their first day or week. This helps newly hired employees to learn what they need more quickly so that they can become productive and contribute much faster. When the process is streamlined and organized, new employees feel valued by their companies because they understand that they want them to succeed. In turn, this leads to improved performance, job satisfaction, and loyalty.

When onboarding is haphazard and ineffective, new employees can quickly become disengaged and frustrated. Workers who are not helped during the learning curve of their new jobs may become complacent. A large organization with an ineffective process stands to waste millions of dollars each year from a loss of productivity.

4) Centralize and Simplify Paperwork

One of the biggest headaches of onboarding employees is the seemingly endless paperwork. When a new employee starts at your company, you do not want to overwhelm him or her with paperwork on the first day. Automation helps to eliminate redundancies by using online forms that collect needed information from employees. Your employees can use e-signatures for important documents from a centralized platform. This helps to avoid having to deal with multiple hard copies and documents simultaneously. Once a new employee finishes the paperwork, all of the forms will be automatically saved online.

Key Takeaways: Why Automating Onboarding is a Game-Changer

Automated onboarding transforms your human resources department by enabling unprecedented efficiency in compliance, document verification and processing, and delivering customized training to enhance employee retention and boost productivity. Investing in onboarding software customized by skilled software specialists boasts an impressive ROI, with Glassdoor surveys reporting a comprehensive onboarding strategy can boost new candidate retention by 80%.

Mitigating turnover is a goal any industry works to achieve, and Chetu designs and deploys customized automated onboarding software carefully tailored to exceed your unique business challenges. Streamline HR workflow, boost employee retention rates, and unlock a portal to modernized onboarding processes to not only reduce expenses but propel your human capital management strategies forward. Chetu partners with top HCM industry leaders such as Workday, UKG, and more to provide expert consulting, customization, implementation, migration, and individualized managed services for all your HCM software.