17 employee onboarding statistics (and a few tips) you need to know about

We recommend using onboarding statistics to decide where to look first in your own process, not to prove that onboarding matters. A national average cannot tell you what is broken at your company, but a gap between it and your own exit data can. The figures below are grouped by the decision they inform, and the section after them says which one to act on first.

Onboarding numbers worth knowing

When people leave

A Forbes column citing HR industry studies says a great deal of staff turnover, possibly as high as 20 percent, happens within the first 45 days. SHRM reports that nearly one-third of new hires quit within the first six months. Senior hires are no safer: an older Center for Creative Leadership study, cited by Inc, found that 40 percent of executives hired at the senior level are pushed out, fail or quit within the first eight months. If you hire senior people, agree on what the role is and what success looks like by month six before the offer, not after.

What it costs

SHRM estimates that replacing an employee costs between 50 and 200 percent of annual salary. PeopleKeep’s summary of Gallup’s figures breaks that down by role: about 40 percent of salary for frontline workers, 80 percent for technical roles and 200 percent for leaders and managers. When you price an early exit for your own budget, use the figure for the role, not the average.

What good onboarding changes

Gallup finds that only 12 percent of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job onboarding new employees. The Recruiting Roundtable found that effective onboarding programs can improve employee performance by 11.5 percent.

SHRM’s onboarding guide says onboarding should last at least a year, and it quotes BambooHR’s CEO saying that only 15 percent of companies continue it after six months. The same guide reports that 56 percent of respondents in a BambooHR study called a buddy or mentor very important when getting started, that Aberdeen Group found high-performing organizations nearly two and a half times more likely than lower-performing ones to assign a mentor or coach during onboarding, and that three-fourths of new hires in a BambooHR survey said training in the first week matters most to them.

Which number to act on first

Match the numbers above to your own exit data and fix that part first:

• People leave in the first weeks. Check hiring fit before you rebuild onboarding: compare the role as the job ad and interviews described it with what the person found in week one.
• People leave between three and six months. Look at what happens after the first two weeks. If onboarding ends with orientation, add check-ins at one month and again between three and six months, and give the new hire a named person to ask.
• People stay but ramp up slowly. Look at the first week. Cut it to what the first task needs and move the rest into pages new hires can search when they need them.

Skip the headline figures for this decision. A Gallup report found that unhappy workers cost the US between $450 and $550 billion a year in lost productivity, which suits a budget slide and gives you nothing to change on Monday. Your own numbers do: list everyone who left in the past year and how long each stayed, then see which of the three groups above they fall into.

We also recommend skipping generation-specific onboarding. Pew counted Millennials, the largest generation in the US labor force, at 35 percent, so a program built for one generation misses most workers. What people look for beyond pay is easier to plan for: Liz Ryan’s Forbes column lists ten things a good job gives besides a paycheck, including a clear mission, recognition and visibility into the team’s plans. Week one can show all three to anyone, whatever their age.

Tips for improving your onboarding

1. Don’t stuff everything into the first week

Nobody can remember a week of presentations, and on-the-job training is often more useful than a pile of slides and docs. Insperity draws the line this way: orientation is a one-time welcome, while onboarding is a series of events and trainings that includes it. Send the paperwork before the start date, as Inc’s Chad Halvorson suggests, so the first day is not a stack of forms.

2. Tell new hires where to go when they need help

Assign a mentor. A well-organized company knowledge base also helps: it gives new hires somewhere to look when they forget something from the onboarding sessions.

3. Over-communicate

When in doubt, say more than you think you need to. Team leads should hold regular one-on-ones with new hires, give feedback both positive and negative, and ask where the new hire wants more help or sees something to improve.