Why Bad Onboarding Could Cost Your Business Nearly Half Your New Hires

This article, written by Bruce Crumley, was originally published on Inc.com.

Onboarding is first real contact that new hires have with their new colleagues and companies. Those sessions are also critical to helping them understand and perform their new jobs. But new survey data indicates many employers are fumbling that initiation process, prompting nearly half of their new hires to consider quitting just months after coming aboard.

The difficulty for businesses to establish and maintain effective onboarding routines generates comments from both sides of the employment equation on social media platforms. Last month, human resources managers on Reddit described their struggles in bringing certain new recruits up to speed. One contributor noted that while some new workers ramp up smoothly, “I also see many new hires confused and struggling… (and) in recent days, some of them even left not long after joining.”

That would have come as no surprised to other redditors who have commented on onboarding challenges from the employee side. One thread began with a contributor saying, “(I) had a recent job that saw a revolving door of new employees because the higher ups didn’t want to give floor managers the time or resources to properly onboard new hires.”

“I’ve left at lunchtime on the first day before,” retorted aptly named in_and_out_burger.

“I’ve never had a ‘good” onboarding experience,” V6corp added, upping the ante.

That disappointment with many company onboarding experiences is apparently shared by a lot more workers than employers may suspect. In a recent survey by Software Finder that polled 1,011 employees hired within the last two years, 48 percent of respondents said they were planning on quitting jobs they’d only recently landed due to poor initiation.

That rate was over a third higher than the 32 percent of recent hires who said they were planning to quit and seek new employment for reasons other than ineffective onboarding. The difference in the two statistics reflects the importance of businesses staying focused on, and continually improving their initiation procedures to help arrivals become more effective and feel comfortable in their new jobs.

“First impressions matter, and while some employees had a positive experience, many were left disappointed with their new employee training,” the Software Finder report on the survey’s results said. “About 46 percent of recently onboarded employees described the process as warm and welcoming, and 34 percent saw it as well-structured. However, nearly 3 in 10 called it disorganized, and over a quarter said it felt rushed.”

Those weren’t the only criticisms by people who said their initiation had soured them on their new jobs and workplaces.

Only 28 percent of survey respondents said recent onboarding had prepared them for the work they were hired to do. Another 67 percent of participants said the process wasn’t germane to the actual duties their job entailed, and also failed to effectively introduce them to the company’s culture.

A similar degree of dissatisfaction was measured by employee training platform TalentLMS, and staff management, payroll, and benefits services company BambooHR. Their poll of 1,156 U.S. employees hired within the last 12 months found 39 percent of respondents saying they’d started doubting their decisions to join their new companies while going through ineffective onboarding procedures. That rate rose to 49 percent among Gen-Zers.

More specifically, 52 percent of participants complained that their onboarding put too much emphasis on administrative details and other formal aspects of their new duties. That, they said, “overshadowed job readiness” that more task-specific training could have provided.

Other objections included immediately receiving excessive amounts of company information, which further complicated respondents’ abilities to understand and perform their new jobs faster. That complaint was voiced by 31 percent of Boomer respondents, and 47 percent of Gen-Zers.

But despite the high rates of onboarding dissatisfaction expressed by recent hires in both surveys, participants also offered ideas for how employers can improve their initiation programs.

For example, when asked what they’d like to see more of during onboarding, Software Finder survey respondents cited realistic previews of job responsibilities, hands-on work training and monitoring, and clearer performance expectations as their top preferences. Also suggested were having a veteran employee mentor assigned to new hires, holding team-bonding activities while the initiation process is still occurring, and consistent follow-throughs by managers once it’s complete.

Another interesting proposal came from the 70 percent of survey participants who said they’d like employers to establish secondary “re-onboarding” procedures six months to a year after the initial process. The main objectives of that, respondents said, would be to fill in any lingering job performance gaps, and allow managers to identify and build on the strengths newer workers had developed.

Back on Reddit, HR professionals also had some ideas for improving onboarding methods, and dissuading recent hires from quitting in disappointment.

“Get turnover data, focusing primarily on people who joined and left within a year,” suggested CoverNegative in a thread on the problem. “Is it localized to a specific department or supervisor even? With all this, put together an onboarding change management plan. You’ll need buy in from the higher ups to hold people accountable.”

One response offered even more insight to other HR managers and their employers in addressing the problem.

“I have done some exit interviews, and (recruits) who left told me they felt kind of isolated as they didn’t have guidelines on what docs to read and whom to ask if they had questions,” said whyg0ng “They also told me that everything felt fine before they were passed to their team, and when they were, they suddenly felt a lot of pressure. So, my idea was to create some personalized onboarding template for new hires and letting each team to fill out that template so that our new hires would be able to get their own personalized onboarding docs.”

The main takeaways from those posts and responses from survey participants seem to be that employers should continually evolve and improve onboarding programs, and never see them as established, unchanging processes. And as part of that ongoing adaptation of initiation methods, businesses should interact with their new hires to get feedback on how the process is working for them, and provide additional support in areas where they’re feeling less informed or confused.