9 Onboarding Metrics To Improve Your Hiring Experience

When you hire someone new at your company, you likely provide them with a company-specific onboarding experience to help them learn how to succeed in their new workplace. This experience creates the basis for an employee’s work environment and may contribute to how they feel about their job, responsibilities, and colleagues. As a manager, it’s useful to understand how you can measure onboarding successes and areas of improvement to ensure you give each new hire a wonderful experience.

In this article, we discuss nine useful onboarding metrics you can use to determine how well your company’s onboarding experience works for new employees, existing team members, and managers.

What are onboarding metrics?

Onboarding metrics are the ways you measure your onboarding procedures in various areas. This helps you determine how well your onboarding experience works for new and existing employees, which lets you know if you’re meeting company hiring and retention goals.

To measure aspects of onboarding, you can divide the process into different parts and measure data about each part through surveys, cost spreadsheets, and other forms of data. For example, you might measure how much your onboarding process costs by examining how much you spent on this experience over a specific time period.

Why are onboarding metrics important?

It’s important to understand onboarding metrics because they can help you provide employees with a better hiring experience, which often leads to them working more productively in the future. Since onboarding is a new hire’s first interaction with your workplace as an employee, it’s vital to know how they react to your onboarding processes and how you can improve the experience for other new hires.

Here’s an overview of how onboarding metrics can help you enhance your hiring experience for employees, managers, and the company:

• Help lower costs: When you know how you’re spending money on onboarding processes, you can lower costs and budget more effectively while maintaining the quality of the experience. Some metrics, like cost and efficiency, allow you to find areas with excessive costs and areas that could use more money and resources.

• Save time for employees: You can also improve the onboarding experience for new and existing employees by recognizing how much time onboarding takes and how you can make it a more effective process. This can increase job satisfaction for all employees and show them you respect their time and opinions about these important procedures.

• Attract more candidates: Improving your onboarding experience after examining various metrics can also help you attract more interested candidates to apply to your company. When college students and people entering the industry hear about how well your company treats new employees, they may be more likely to apply for a job and increase your pool of talented individuals.

• Retain more new hires: Another important reason to measure onboarding successes is to retain more of the people you hire by giving them a supportive and welcoming experience. Employees who have a positive onboarding experience when starting a job may feel higher levels of job satisfaction and happiness, and they may be more prepared for their duties.

 

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9 onboarding metrics for measuring success

Consider the following nine onboarding metrics you can use to measure the success of your hiring experience:

1. Training Completion

One metric you can use to measure onboarding processes is whether new employees can complete all the training required of them in a certain time period. Measuring this can tell you whether your training goals for new hires are realistically achievable, and how much time employees may need to complete their training while still remembering the information they learn.

To measure how well new employees are completing their training, consider meeting with them every week until their training period is over to ask about their progress. You can also use training software that allows you to track which training modules each employee has completed. Once the training period is over, ask employees to rate the experience and provide feedback so you can better understand how to adapt training and support new hires effectively.

2. New employee satisfaction

The satisfaction of new employees is another key indicator of how well your onboarding processes meet expectations and achieve goals. New employees rely on the information they get from onboarding, like training courses, introductions to colleagues, and regular meetings with managers. Their satisfaction can be greatly increased with proper onboarding techniques, and this satisfaction can make employees feel more fulfilled and prepared for their work.

You can measure the satisfaction of your new employees through surveys and individual meetings. With this information, you can better understand how your hiring practices affect the happiness and comfort of new hires. Creating a more welcoming onboarding experience by examining how your current procedures affect job satisfaction can lead to improved productivity and morale within your company.

3. Leadership satisfaction

Besides new hires, you can also measure how people in leadership positions who work with new employees feel about the onboarding process. This is useful because you and other managers and supervisors are vital to the onboarding experience for most new hires, so your opinions about the process can help you improve onboarding for everyone involved. Measuring the satisfaction of leadership can also give you a better idea of how new employees across your department respond to onboarding, as the satisfaction of employees often affects the satisfaction of management.

One way to measure this is to gather all your fellow managers and team leads who help with the onboarding process in your department for a meeting. You can then provide surveys or conduct polls to learn how satisfied each leader is with the onboarding process and how it impacts their team.

4. Voluntary turnover

Voluntary turnover rates are a great metric to determine how well your employees adapt to their new working environment. When you provide plenty of support and encouragement during their first few weeks of employment, you can often lower the rates at which employees resign. This is because employees feel respected and valued in jobs with positive onboarding processes, and they have the tools they need to succeed throughout their career with your company, which often provides less incentive to leave.

You can keep track of turnover rates by examining how many employees resign from their positions over a period of time, like a month. You can then divide the number of resignations by the number of total employees, including those who resigned that month, to figure out the percentage of employees leaving.

5. Involuntary turnover

Involuntary turnover is another useful metric for measuring onboarding and other hiring processes, like recruiting. Involuntary turnover refers to when you have to terminate employees because they weren’t a good fit for your company. Reviewing the numbers of involuntary turnover rates allows you to see how many employees get terminated in a time period, which can allow you to determine whether your hiring and onboarding practices find talented individuals and support them properly.

Measuring involuntary turnover is the same process as measuring voluntary turnover, which involves dividing the number of terminated employees in a month by the number of total employees. Pay extra attention to whether you’re terminating employees during their training or introductory period to the company, then consider how you can enhance hiring criteria and onboarding support to lower this number.

6. Ramp-up productivity

An important part of onboarding for many employees is the ramp-up process, during which you slowly increase the amount of work and responsibility a new hire has until they reach their expected work potential. Often, you might set new productivity goals for these employees each week to help them adjust to their duties and become more confident and comfortable in their work. Examining this onboarding metric gives you a better idea of how well employees can meet these goals and whether they’re realistic and useful.

Consider monitoring a new employee’s work during the ramp-up period of onboarding, either by checking their progress in weekly meetings or tracking the work they complete in a management software program. Try to predict their work progression to determine goals, and if they aren’t meeting those goals, you can meet with them to discuss challenges.

7. Team retention

Because managers and team leads are crucial to making a positive onboarding experience, you can also measure the retention rates of employees on various teams. This can help you learn which teams and managers may provide a more welcoming and supportive onboarding experience and which teams can improve their processes. If you manage a department or a large group of employees, this is a useful metric for learning how you can create more consistent hiring experiences.

To measure team retention rates, divide the number of employees who have left a team or the company in a time period, and divide this number by the total amount of employees on the team. Compare these results between multiple teams and departments to learn if these numbers are typical or if some leaders retain employees more easily.

8. New employee engagement

How well your new employees engage with their colleagues and the workplace is another way to measure the success of your onboarding processes. Besides preparing new hires for their jobs, onboarding is an opportunity to introduce them to your work community and integrate them into the company culture. When employees establish relationships with their coworkers and create bonds, they’re more likely to ask for necessary help and feel connected to their workplace.

Surveys and questionnaires are useful tools for measuring the engagement of new employees at work. You can ask them direct questions about their experiences in the workplace community and whether they feel accepted, respected and valued. Then, compile the answers to learn how your company’s onboarding practices impact employee engagement and use the results to create new ways to help employees adjust to their workplace and form professional relationships.

9. Cost of hiring

Costs are important to measure often in business, so it’s a good idea to consider this onboarding metric when examining your hiring processes. Related costs may include marketing open positions, recruiting, training, providing work equipment and even taking time from the manager’s days to help with the process. If you can learn more about the cost of various areas of onboarding, you can more easily determine which areas are more expensive and how you can create a more efficient and cost-effective procedure for new hires.

Measuring costs is typically easy because you can check your department’s financial records to see how much you spend on average for onboarding. Try to compare the usefulness of different areas with the cost to find out if you can lower spending and save time by adapting those areas. For example, if most new employees find it challenging to complete all of their training, and the training is expensive, consider ways to shorten those programs to save money and time.

I hope you find this article helpful.