The Best Employee Onboarding Software For New Hires
Published: 2022-12-09 07:14:33

The employee onboarding software listed in this article will help you streamline HR processes and make new hires fall in love with your organization.

Here’s a riddle for you:

What involves legions of paperwork...
Hours of straining to remember passwords...
Heaps of fumbling with unfamiliar computer systems...
And an embarrassingly large number of forgotten coworker names?

Yep, you guessed it, the joys of employee onboarding from the perspective of your new hires.

Truth is, many employees find the onboarding process uninspiring. For example, Gallup found that just 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a stellar job of onboarding new employees.

So, with 88% of new workers unimpressed by their experience, there has to be a better way to onboard new hires, right?

Your [onboarding software](https://www.hrcloud.com/blog/5-tips-for-onboarding-a-new-team-member-successfully) essentially lays the foundation from which the rest of your onboarding experience is built. 

And as renowned chef Martin Yan put it; ’You can do almost anything with soup stock, it's a strong foundation. When you have the right foundation, everything tastes good.’

To that end, we spent hours scouring the web to put together the definitive list of the best employee onboarding software as we get ready to enter 2023.

If you’re time-pressed and want to launch right into the action, feel free to skip ahead to the reviews right away:

- Helpjuice
- Scribe
- Continu
- BambooHR
- Talmundo
- Eddy 
- Zenefits
- Click Boarding
- CakeHR
- FactoHR
- Kin
- Lessonly
- Trello
If you’d like to learn more about why employee onboarding is important, why software should be part of your employee onboarding best practices, and how to choose the right software for your business, then buckle up and let’s get going!


## Why Good Employee Onboarding is Important

“Look,
If you had
One-shot
Or one opportunity
To keep the employees you always wanted
In one moment
Would you capture it
Or just let it slip?...”

While we’re not sure that Eminem is an expert on customer onboarding, his (slightly edited) intro to ‘Lose Yourself’ serves as a fantastic reminder for HR departments around the world about the importance of onboarding for employee retention.

See, employee onboarding is a prime opportunity to win the hearts and minds of your new hires. It’s the perfect window to impart your organization's culture and can make a real difference to how those fresh faces feel about your company.

Without good onboarding, you risk losing your new staff quickly. In fact, Digitate found that employees who had a poor onboarding experience are twice as likely to look for other career opportunities in the near future.

And as if losing staff wasn’t already demoralizing enough, the ensuing turnover costs can wreak havoc on your bottom line. 

Glassdoor reported that the average US employer spends $4,000 and takes 24 days to hire a new worker. 

That means if your employee decides to give the slip, your hiring costs could effectively be doubled. And that’s not even counting the loss of productivity.

The good news is that when you do employee onboarding well, you can replace most of these pesky statistics with much more encouraging ones. 

The benefits of a successful employee onboarding process has the power to seriously boost the engagement, satisfaction, retention and productivity of your workers.  For example:

- Glassdoor found that organizations with great onboarding increase new hire retention by 82% and boost productivity by more than 70%.
- BambooHR reported that employees who felt their onboarding was effective were 18x more likely to feel committed to their organization.
- What’s more, The Society for Human Resource Management showed that almost 70% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for at least 3 years if they experienced great onboarding.

So, the evidence is clear; when you get employees aligned with your mission, engaged with their work and invested in your company for the long-haul, they’ll be happier and you’ll find it easier to achieve the success you’re looking for.

## How Can HR Onboarding Solutions Help?

Traditionally onboarding is riddled with inefficiencies. But great employee onboarding software is helping HR departments and hiring managers to reduce their workload and better handle the needs of their new hires.

Here’s how:

### 1. Less Heavy Lifting, More Onboarding

Whereas old-school onboarding involved oodles of manual work such as filling out and filing drab forms, employee onboarding software removes the bulk of the heavy lifting. 

This gives HR teams more time to focus on the stuff that really matters such as face-to-face contact and providing new hires with what they need to succeed.

### 2. All Your Information in One Place

No more mucking about trying to find an employee agreement that was stashed away three years ago.

Employee onboarding software centralizes all of your information into one secure location so it’s never more than just a few clicks away. Not only that, but it does mother nature a solid by removing paper waste from the equation too.

### 3. A More Consistent Experience

How do you know if your new hires are covering all of the aspects of your employee onboarding process?

Onboarding software streamlines and standardizes the process, which increases compliance, saves mountains of time and ensures everyone gets the same valuable employee experience.

### 4. Increased Productivity From Day One

Flip the onboarding script from being a process that new hires have to endure to a process they’re actively involved in. Self-service capabilities mean that new hires can undertake onboarding before they ever set foot in the office. That means faster settling in a shorter time to reach full productivity.

## How To Choose The Best Employee Onboarding Software

So you need an onboarding system but you’re not sure where to start.

Don’t worry, in this section, we’ll lay out what you need to consider to make the best decision for your business.

### 1. Start With The End in Mind

Things work best when you know what you’re trying to achieve. So, write down the main objectives you want to reach by using an employee onboarding tool.

Perhaps you want to slash the costs of manually updating information. Maybe you’re looking to speed up the time to competency for new employees. Whatever you hope to achieve, knowing what you want will help you decide the best onboarding software for you.

### 2. Determine How Much You Want to Spend

Different onboarding systems come at varying prices. In addition, lots of them have different payment models: some are subscription-based, some are pay per user while others are quote-based.

So, knock heads with the finance team and settle on a budget. Then rank the types of payment-models in order of preference from most desirable to least desirable.

### 3. Identify The Features You Need

Using your goals as a guide, identify which features will give you the power to achieve them. 

Some tools come with a myriad of features that you won’t use but will pay for. So, zero in on must-have features that’ll directly help you reach your goals and cross anything else off the list.

### 4. Think About Integration

If you’re using other HR software, consider how your new employee onboarding solution can integrate into your overall software ecosystem. 

Seamless integration reduces the stress of having to navigate between multiple apps and helps create a consistent user interface for a better onboarding experience.

### 5. Consider Installation

Depending on the size of your organization, the time frame to implement a new onboarding software can vary greatly. 

Software vendors might be able to offer larger companies a dedicated implementation consultant to manage the roll-out. 

For smaller businesses, vendors might offer an out of the box cloud-based solutions that can be implemented in a few simple steps.

### 6. Make Sure It’s Easy to Use

This one seems obvious, but user-friendliness is key. The last thing you want to do is add complexity to the very process you’re trying to simplify. Skip software that’s going to frustrate you and your new employees by asking vendors for a free trial.

Ok, we’re making awesome progress here! Putting all this information together should leave you in a much stronger position to determine the best onboarding solution for your needs.

So without further ado, let’s jump into the top employee onboarding software solutions you should think about using for 2022 and beyond.