Accepting a new job offer is an exciting time for an employee. It can signify a fresh start, an opportunity for career advancement, and a chance to build relationships with new colleagues.
But as an employer, this period can be stressful. You feel a sense of responsibility for ensuring those first few weeks run smoothly—from checking all the legal boxes to giving your new hire a warm welcome.
Solid processes (supported by automation) can help you avoid any missteps in this pivotal period. Awareness of five common onboarding issues means you can fix them before they arise, creating a smooth and satisfying onboarding experience for your employees.
Five onboarding challenges (and fixes) for midmarket organizations
Onboarding is a pricey process—to a certain extent, there’s no way around that. Between hard costs like workplace setup and training sessions and soft costs like time and productivity loss, your organization will likely invest thousands into a new employee.
In other words, it pays to optimize your onboarding process. Here are five common challenges and how you can overcome them:
1. New hires aren’t kept warm
According to Qualtric’s 2024 Employee Experience Trends Report, 39% of new hires who’ve been with their employer for less than six months plan to leave within the next 12 months. That’s a six-point increase from 2023.
To keep new employees from walking away, you need to engage them and help them feel valued from the start. That includes the critical period between the job offer and the start date.
“Workflows are often built for internal systems—notifying IT that they need to order equipment or notifying your hiring manager about the start date,” says Janelle O’Neil, Director of People Operations & Systems at Nintex. “But you don’t want to miss reaching out to the prospective hire to keep them warm.”
Fix it: Build workflows for your managers that allow them to automatically contact brand-new hires. For example, you could automatically send a friendly email seven days after the offer to make sure they have everything they need.
2. Training is ineffective
52% of new hires feel undertrained after onboarding—and that’s a contributing factor to why they leave. In fact, more than 1 in 5 new hires in the US who leave in six months or less say they could have had more effective training.
“Sometimes people get thrown in the deep end when they start a new job,” O’Neil says. “Unless you have a certain type of person, they won’t be successful. And if they don’t feel successful, they won’t want to stay.”
Fix it: Incorporating key training into the onboarding process can cement a new hire’s position in the company. That could mean showing them that there is a plan, letting them know what to expect over the first 30-60-90 days, or pointing them toward a learning management system (LMS) with additional information.
For example, you can set it up so that if someone becomes a manager, they receive seven specific videos—eliminating room for manual error and taking the burden off HR. Or send training modules out at a customized cadence to help new hires understand their responsibilities without being overwhelmed.
The Nintex Platform can help by keeping employees up-to-date with training. With its if-then logic, the built-in workflow tool can assign the right coursework to the right employees and track completion rates.
Pro tip: Consider re-onboarding if your company hasn’t been consistent with training in the past. Re-onboarding involves asking every employee to complete an introductory program to reestablish norms and expectations. A recent survey by Paychex found that 71% of employees want their companies to re-onboard them—and that the process improves employee retention by 43%.
3. Onboarding is an administrative burden
Onboarding can help people feel welcome and at ease at their new company. But without clear processes, your managers and HR staff must constantly function in “reactive” mode, having to scrape together important forms and documents and remember who needs to receive what and when.
Think about it:
Hiring a new employee can take a month or two, and there’s a ton of paperwork to sort out and back-and-forth with the new hire in that period, like completing tax forms or delivering important benefits information. Completing and filing paper documents takes time, effort, and physical storage space. The administrative tasks that come with the sheer volume of paperwork, either through a manual or digital process, can take quite a toll. Many organizations struggle to overcome the headache of keeping track of all the documents needed when welcoming a new team member.
Fix it: You can make things much easier for yourself by using digital files and storing them all in one place for easy access and safekeeping. Nintex Forms and Advanced Workflow with fully integrated eSignature tools enable you to eliminate paperwork and automate the process of approving, routing, and storing your onboarding documents in the right place every time—without chasing paper trails.
4. The welcome process is confusing
Your new employee’s first week can be daunting, and they’ll look to you for support and help.
The welcome you provide will set the tone for the rest of their time with you. If you start things off the wrong way, you might never recover, and that new hire might simply walk away.
This is especially important now that so many people work remotely. “If you don’t have a structure when you onboard someone remotely, that first day will feel like a trainwreck to them,” O’Neil says. “They’ll just be sitting at their computer, wondering who to reach out to.”
Fix it: Plan the first day for new hires well in advance. Consider how to convey important details, help them get to know your company, and show them where they fit in.
Send an email the day before the employee’s start date to outline what they can expect that first day and week. Make sure you mention what meetings they’ll need to attend, which trainings they must complete, and where they can find a knowledge base to explore more on their own.
Then, use a process platform like Nintex to complete your seamless welcome process by scheduling tours for new employees unique to their role or department or setting up and sending out details of a team lunch or remote meet-and-greet.
5. Technical onboarding is inefficient
Making sure a new hire is set up for success also means paying attention to technical details, like hardware procurement and platform logins. Otherwise, your new employee will spend more time staring at a blank screen than digging into their new role—and their original enthusiasm and motivation will start to wane.
But procurement and technical onboarding pose questions like, “Who will make sure they get their computer?” or “Who’s loading them into the systems?” And if you don’t have a solid process, you’ll likely waste time across functions, from HR to IT to Finance, as you try to sort things out.
Fix it: Have a technical onboarding workflow to ensure new hires have all the equipment, logins, and software they need to get started. With Nintex, you can set up a workflow that automatically generates an email and notifications to each relevant function to get new hires into IT systems, calendaring, etc. That way, all stakeholders automatically stay in the loop, and you ensure every detail gets handled quickly for each person you hire.
Where to get started improving your onboarding process
Creating a smooth onboarding process makes your company look professional to new hires, eases their first weeks and months, and saves you administrative time and hassle. So, where do you start?
Build your plan with the essentials in mind first. “Always start with the legally required paperwork and easily automated administrative tasks,” O’Neil says. These steps—like the I-9 form, tax paperwork, or harassment training—are the foundation of your onboarding process.
Then, build the rest of your onboarding process around these tasks, diagramming it out in the Nintex Platform. Ask yourself what needs to happen and who needs to be involved. Then, you can start routing your information and steps in the most optimal way.
Pro tip: Get granular as you plan. For each task, for example, consider whether it needs to happen on a call or can happen async due to working across time zones.
The onboarding process is only the first step
How you interact with and welcome new hires in the early days will determine their first impression of you and your company. The easier you make the hiring process and the more information you give them upfront, the more valued they will feel.
But making the onboarding process easy for the new hire also makes it easier for you. By setting up automated processes to provide the training and information new employees need, you’ll save time, money, and mental bandwidth.
Want to learn more about how the Nintex Platform can help you streamline HR processes like onboarding? Check out The intelligent automation guide for Human Resources
