What to Look for in Your Next Employee Onboarding Software?

Onboarding software leaves a lasting impression on everyone it touches. 

It matters to the organization because it helps new employees understand and become part of a new culture through their new role, and to employees. After all, it establishes how they are likely to experience their time at their new organization. 

Good onboarding software can promote productivity, as employees quickly understand their tasks and expectations, leading to higher retention rates and a more positive employee experience, where they feel positively about their organization. 

This article covers everything to look for in your new employee onboarding software to give employees the best first impression and make them stay. 

Ease of Use and Accessibility

Your employees need to find new tools easy to use, and these tools need to have a design profile that fits all users. 

User-friendly design incorporates many elements of an intuitive UI (user-interface) that require minimal instructions on how to use it, convenient placement of buttons for the most frequently used features, and fast performance. 

Other aspects you need to look out for in onboarding software are mobile access, to allow staff to engage in onboarding on the go, and intuitive interfaces for all users, which include HR staff and new employees learning their new role.

Customization and Flexibility

People are diverse, with a wide array of needs, and they work across many different departments within different roles. Your onboarding software needs to be customizable and flexible to meet these needs through different features and options. 

Customization allows HR staff or department managers to adjust an onboarding software to the needs of their department workflows, allowing new employees to learn fast as they work. 

These customization options cater to different roles, departments, and compliance requirements to help HR remain compliant and support new staff to learn every detail of their role. 

Integration with Existing Systems

It can be enticing to invest in a shiny new technology, and onboarding software is no exception, especially with new, more powerful, and engaging tools coming out every month. But the reality is that some of these tools will not integrate with your existing tech stack. 

Check that your new onboarding tool is compatible with HR tools, payroll, and performance tools to give staff a seamless experience and allow streamlined data sharing to reduce the frustrations of data duplication. 

Automation and Efficiency

It’s crucial to treat incoming employees as individuals, but they, like customers, want speed and precision from their organization right from their first experience. Automation and efficiency are essential characteristics of any onboarding software, so look out for mentions of these on vendor landing pages and review sites. 

Keep an eye out for automated reminders, document collection, and task tracing to ensure you get everything you need in your new onboarding tool. These features will reduce the manual workload for HR staff, allowing them to focus on offering new staff a more human welcome, as the onboarding tool takes care of the efficiency side.

Compliance and Security

Your new onboarding technology will only achieve ROI if it hits compliance and security requirements. After all, these tools hold large volumes of sensitive data on employees, and they need to remain in the right hands to avoid the litigation and reputational damage of breaching legal and regulatory requirements. 

The best onboarding software tools offer secure storage and access for sensitive employee information. Always prioritize safety and security when investing in a new onboarding tool. 

Reporting and Analytics

HR needs to use onboarding software to not only give incoming hires the best impression of their new organization, and orient them to their new role. It also needs to capture data using these tools for reporting and analytics to measure the effectiveness of the new onboarding software with data insights. 

When shopping for a new onboarding tool, it’s crucial to look out for reporting and analytics features that capture time-to-productivity reports, completion rates, and engagement and feedback dashboards so HR can measure the effectiveness of the onboarding process using the new tool. If the data suggests that staff do not engage with a new tool, it might be worth replacing it. 

Scalability for Growing Teams

The final consideration is how well the employee onboarding software will scale with your company as workforces increase from small to larger sizes. The flexibility to adapt is crucial to success for any onboarding software, so ensure that scalability is mentioned on product homepages if scalability will be significant for your company in the coming years. 

Conclusion

There are many different considerations you need to make when buying your next employee onboarding software:

• Ease of use and accessibility.
• Customization and flexibility.
• Integration with existing systems.
• Automation and efficiency.
• Compliance and security. 
• Reporting and analytics.
• Scalability for growing teams.
• Summarize key features to prioritize.

Choose the right employee onboarding tool to give your new employees the best first impression of your organization and support them to guide your company toward lasting success.