7 reasons the importance of onboarding will only increase

May 29, 2025

 

Alex Oliver

10 min read

According to a 2025 Deloitte survey, 60% of employees now expect their company to play an active role in motivating them to perform. When it comes to employee motivation, you can’t overstate the importance of onboarding. It lays the foundation for your new hire’s success and connects them to your company’s culture, values, and long-term opportunities. 

But for enterprises with high-volume hiring, sometimes the onboarding process is second to finding skilled talent before your competition. Let’s break down why investing in effective onboarding programs leads to better business outcomes, from faster time-to-productivity to increased retention, improved engagement and strengthened company culture.

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1. Creates a positive first impression

A job interview is your first impression of the candidate, but the onboarding process is your new hire’s first impression of you. It establishes the tone for their experience at your organization and can enhance their excitement after a successful job search. By capitalizing on this feeling, you can energize them to do well and even increase the likelihood they remain in the long term.

To do this, structure your onboarding process to the new hire’s role and experience level. Preboarding workflows and new hire paperwork are not as exciting as the cultural aspects of onboarding, but many companies don’t get these “boring” fundamentals right.

Great onboarding platforms, such as iCIMS, can handle the administrative side of onboarding for you. Doing these things well means new employees feel a sense of confidence, belonging, and potentially even relief that they made the right choice.

How to deliver a positive first impression

A company that pairs new office employees with a field worker to learn about their day-to-day work enables them to understand the business from the ground up while fostering interdepartmental relationships.

Compare this to a similar company that only provides a packet about the business for the employee to memorize. You’ll create a more unforgettable experience with the first than the second scenario while training employees on your business practices.

You can also create a positive first impression in your onboarding process by:

• Delivering swag bags or other welcome items.
• Sending welcome messages or videos from leadership and immediate team members before their first day.
• Assigning new hire buddies as peer mentors and company culture champions.

Many recruiting and onboarding technology platforms can also help with your efforts. With iCIMS Onboarding, for example, new employees start interacting with their new teams through a personalized onboarding portal, welcome videos and company news, so they feel like a part of the team even before their first day.

2. Helps new hires understand their role and expectations

Role clarity, or how much an employee understands their role and responsibilities, is key to employee retention and satisfaction. An Ohio State University study even indicates that workplaces with higher levels of role clarification have lower turnover rates.

Identifying expectations and responsibilities for employees during onboarding sets them up for success and reduces the chances of early attrition. Don’t assume new hires with years of experience will understand your company’s processes and goals.

These assumptions do more harm than good. Beyond feeling confused and frustrated, employees may focus on objectives that don’t align with your company’s mission, increasing the chances of mistakes that negatively affect your bottom line.

How to establish role understanding and expectations

Instead, add some clarity to your onboarding experience with the following strategies:

• Explain the job description: What are immediate versus future job goals? Is there any misalignment between the employees’ understanding of a responsibility and yours?
• Identify key performance indicators (KPIs): What metrics illustrate the employee’s success in their role? Do they understand and have the right tools to meet these objectives?
• Provide clear objectives for the first year: Notify employees what they need to accomplish in their first week, month, 60 days, 90 days, six months and one year.
• Hold frequent one-on-ones: Managers and your human resources (HR) team should regularly follow up with new hires to ensure they quickly address employees’ questions and concerns and course-correct when necessary.

Explore the Keys to a Seamless New Hire Process that will enhance your onboarding.

3. Boosts employee engagement and confidence

A good onboarding process that allows employees to learn, make mistakes and adapt to their new roles creates a sense of ownership over their tasks. This newfound confidence encourages informed risk-taking that can lead to company innovation.

Even better: When you keep employees engaged, the more likely they’ll stay. With Gallup research indicating that 37% of employees leave their jobs due to engagement and culture, developing a robust onboarding process that gets employees enthusiastic about their positions is a powerful retention strategy.

How to instill confidence and engagement early on

Confident and engaged employees are more likely to be productive and contribute to a positive work culture than those who are apprehensive and bored. You can start building up employees’ confidence in the role through an onboarding experience that:

• Clarifies job expectations.
• Fosters bonds with coworkers.
• Supports continuous feedback and training.

4. Reduces early employee turnover

When onboarding is rushed or inconsistent, new hires are more likely to feel disconnected, uncertain about expectations, or overwhelmed — all of which increase the risk of them leaving within the first few months. 

Spending time and money on an effective onboarding process can pay dividends. Besides reducing hiring costs — a whopping $4,700 per new hire — you’re preventing other negative effects of employee turnover, like a loss of productivity and institutional knowledge.

Employees who receive proper onboarding start contributing to your business goals faster so you remain agile. You’ll also avoid another round of recruitment and hiring that takes pivotal team members, like hiring managers, away from their daily responsibilities.

How to reduce new hire turnover

One of the most overlooked factors in early employee turnover is, frankly, regret. Even after a smooth hiring process, some employees second-guess their decision.

To combat this, onboarding shouldn’t just be about training and paperwork. It should reinforce the employee’s choice to join your company. The goal is to move beyond orientation and toward affirmation — helping new hires feel confident they made the right move.

Here’s how to approach it:

• Share the “why” behind the hire: Encourage managers to explain how the employee’s unique skills, experience, or perspective are valued and needed — not just for the role, but for the team’s future success.
• Celebrate early wins: Suggest leadership acknowledge new hire contributions, even if they’re small, in their first few weeks. Recognition from next-level management validates the new hire’s impact and builds momentum.
• Tell the success stories: Introduce new hires to peers who joined recently and have already grown into bigger roles. This helps them envision a long-term path and feel inspired.
• Be transparent about the growing pains: Normalize the learning curve by openly discussing what challenges are typical for new hires and how your team supports them through it.

When onboarding focuses on emotional validation — not just logistics — it reduces “buyer’s remorse” and helps new employees stay committed, even when the job gets challenging.

5. Strengthens employer reputation and brand

As an enterprise, a strong onboarding experience is more than preparing new hires for their role; it is also a marketing tool. Think of the engagement your brand receives when new workers post on LinkedIn about their onboarding or provide reviews on Glassdoor.

A new hire raving about your supportive company culture and career opportunities illustrates your employer value proposition (EVP), attracts potential hires and can even impress customers who appreciate your commitment to your employees.

How to strengthen reputation and brand during onboarding

You can leverage technology to highlight your company’s onboarding as part of your employer branding and recruitment marketing strategies.

For instance, with candidate relationship management platforms such as iCIMS Employer Branding, you can promote your onboarding process to prospective candidates using generative AI-powered chatbots and video testimonials featuring current employees.

This approach helps you build a strong brand reputation alongside positive word-of-mouth from current and former staff.

6. Enhances productivity and job satisfaction

Employees who understand how their work contributes to your company’s broader goals through effective onboarding tend to be satisfied with their jobs and find their work more meaningful. And when employees find their work meaningful, they are 2.7 times more likely to stay in a position, leading to recruitment time and cost savings for you.

How to start with high employee productivity and job satisfaction

Getting new employees up to speed quickly in a new role is one of the biggest reasons why onboarding is important. Proper on-the-job training, including guidance on role expectations, culture, values, workflows, tools and safety standards, decreases new hires’ time-to-productivity, so that they start adding to your company’s success sooner.

Interested in tools to streamline your recruiting and onboarding efforts? Learn how talent acquisition software supports effective onboarding.

7. Provides long-term career development opportunities

Onboarding new employees typically includes hard and soft skills training, from learning new software, equipment and workflows to personal qualities like empathy, communication and time management. But to truly increase employee retention, use the onboarding experience to highlight future training and career opportunities with your company for your recruits.

According to LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report, companies that champion career development outperform those that don’t in employee retention. Being transparent about the new worker’s career path gives employees a sense of purpose and a reason to stay, knowing you will support them in their professional development.

How to highlight career development to new hires

You can illustrate your commitment to career growth during onboarding through:

• Role banding: Explain the experience and responsibilities needed for employees to advance to more senior positions, like moving from an HR generalist to an HR manager.
• Employee development plans: Outline your company’s formal process for supporting new hire’s career ambitions, like goal planning, training paths and regular manager check-ins.
• E-learning courses: Showcase your learning management software with technical and soft skills courses employees can enroll in and learn at their own pace.
• Opportunity marketplaces: Highlight where employees can explore open roles and test their hand at different company projects that can jumpstart their career advancement, plus optimize your internal recruiting practices.
• Learning and development (L&D) teams: Introduce employees to your L&D teams, who can craft personalized training plans and career options for employees.

Does your onboarding process measure up?

Take a look at your historical employee retention and engagement rates for new hires during their first year. If they haven’t improved, or worse, dropped year-over-year, it’s time to give your employee onboarding process a makeover.

Developing an effective onboarding workflow can be the difference between dedicated employees ready to stay and grow with your company and disengaged workers already scrolling through job postings.

Even a well-defined onboarding workflow may need a bit of fine-tuning. Maybe your applicant tracking system doesn’t sync with your human capital management system, causing repetitive data entry and training delays. Or maybe employees don’t have a place to track their onboarding tasks and assess their progress toward full productivity.

iCIMS provides all of the above with an effective ATS that integrates with onboarding software to create a seamless candidate-to-employee experience.

Discover how iCIMS delivers all the benefits of onboarding inside an all-in-one platform for enterprises hiring talent at scale.