Recruiting, onboarding, and training new hires is never easy, but it's especially challenging right now. Research shows that 47% of companies struggle with onboarding employees due to infrastructure challenges.
The pre-onboarding gap
Even before a new hire's first day, there's a crucial pre-onboarding phase that’s often overlooked. This period between accepting the offer and the start date sets the tone for the employee experience.
“Giving candidates a meaningful experience before they’ve even met a recruiter transforms the entire hiring dynamic. With a dedicated portal, they can connect with your culture, hear from leaders, and prepare for what’s ahead—so by the time they join their first conversation, they’re already informed, engaged, and bought in. Candidates can feel the difference when a company has been intentional about their experience, and in a competitive talent market, that’s what sets you apart.” Lyndsay Kearsey, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner, Absorb
Here are some ways to bridge the pre-onboarding gap:
- Welcome package: Send a new hire a welcome package that includes company swag, essential information about the first day, and details about benefits.
- Pre-boarding checklist: Provide an onboarding checklist of tasks to complete before the start date, such as completing paperwork or setting up access to company systems.
- Introduce the team: Connect your new hire with team members virtually before their first day. This can be done through email introductions, a video call, or a welcome message in a team chat platform.
The case for a strong onboarding program
As employees, we've all been there. You start a new job feeling excited but overwhelmed. You're not sure who to ask questions, what the company culture is like, or where to find the resources to succeed. This is where a strong onboarding program comes in.
An onboarding program lays the foundation for a happy and productive workforce. It's more than paperwork and mandatory training. It's giving your employees the tools to understand a company's values, policies, and generally how things work.
With a structured program, you’ll support your new team members, delivering only the necessary training. That means less stress for your HR team and a faster path to helping employees feel like valuable members of the team.
Today’s onboarding challenges
Onboarding new team members is no small task for companies. Many struggle to get new employees up to speed efficiently, either due to a lack of formal structure or an unengaging program. Additionally, setting them up with the right tech and communicating expectations can be hurdles. These gaps can leave new hires feeling lost and hinder their ability to become productive members of the team quickly.
Gallup via Fosway Group
In short, investing in a well-designed onboarding process benefits both employees (better experience, higher satisfaction) and companies (reduced turnover, cost savings).
Keeping employees engaged keeps your company growing
Your organization’s success hinges on your workforce. When your employees feel invested and motivated, they show up for your company – generating positive business outcomes.
Streamline new hire onboarding with Absorb LMS
Absorb LMS gives businesses an edge to overcome onboarding challenges, and the numbers speak for themselves. We commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) report, taking an in-depth look at the value of Absorb LMS. The study found that onboarding takes 40% less time with Absorb and reduces onboarding costs by $200 per learner.
"The ideal onboarding experience is a natural progression: a candidate launchpad tailored to them before they've even interviewed, a new hire portal when they join, and then a smooth automated transition into the standard employee experience. The infrastructure is largely there in a good LMS, what's often missing is the organizational intentionality to design that full journey and connect the stages together. The organization's that get this right are the ones that treat onboarding as a continuous experience, not a series of separate handoffs." Troy Powell, Director, Human Resources, Absorb
Our platform helps you bring new hires up to speed faster and provides growth opportunities so they're motivated to stay longer, all from an intuitive dashboard that's as user-friendly for administrators as it is for learners. With scalable features and powerful AI, it's clear how Absorb LMS earned its reputation as the go-to learning solution.
- Engage: Create a collaborative learning environment where new hires can connect, share knowledge, and reinforce what they've learned as they move through their onboarding journey. Social learning tools, gamification, and personalized experiences keep learners hooked, directly in the flow of work.
- Absorb Intelligence: Streamline admin tasks like assigning onboarding courses and company training, giving your L&D team the freedom to focus on more strategic initiatives. AI simplifies and accelerates day-to-day tasks so admins can find information faster, act on activities immediately, and identify opportunities without manual effort.
- Analyze: Measure the impact of your onboarding programs with full-service LMS business intelligence tools and ad hoc dashboards. Absorb LMS tracks learner progress metrics automatically, then conducts data analysis to evaluate program effectiveness, so you can prove ROI and continuously improve the new hire experience.
- Create AI: Leverage generative AI to build, edit, and publish courses for new hires in minutes. A versatile online course builder for onboarding that combines the power and functionality of legacy tools without their limitations, and no coding required.
- Skills: Don't just onboard new hires; set them on a path to grow. Absorb Skills is an AI-powered upskilling tool that identifies, tracks, and develops employee skills at scale, enabling organizations to close skill gaps, align learning with business goals, and prepare employees for future roles. From day one, new hires can self-assess against hundreds of competencies and receive personalized learning paths tailored to their career goals, turning onboarding into a long-term retention strategy.
- Together: Learning doesn't happen in a silo. Absorb is the first learning management system to incorporate full-scale mentoring and coaching software into its ecosystem, uniting the power of both platforms. By pairing Absorb LMS with Together, organizations can connect new hires with mentors from day one, delivering strategic learning programs tied to business priorities, creating personalized learning paths that inspire and retain talent, and building a culture of continuous development from the very start.
