Onboarding Metrics to Track for HR and Employee Success

Tracking onboarding metrics is critical for HR teams and staff to be effective during the employee onboarding process. Otherwise, the efforts that work, and those that miss the mark, won’t be clearly defined or acknowledged.

By applying HR metrics to the onboarding process, organizations can accurately measure their effectiveness. This data provides valuable insights that can improve a company’s onboarding completion rate and decrease employee turnover. The challenge is knowing which metrics to track and trust.

Here we’ll explore helpful key performance indicators and metrics for establishing and tracking the success of an employee onboarding program.

What are onboarding metrics, and why are they important to measure?

Onboarding metrics are data-driven information that provide accurate measures for drawing conclusions about the onboarding experience. These insights aren’t subjective or open to opinion.

By measuring past onboarding efforts, HR can determine which onboarding processes perform well, are mediocre, or fail. Reviewing outcomes helps HR know what to keep, change, or add to set new hires up for a positive onboarding experience.

Why use onboarding metrics and KPIs?

It’s important to develop and track certain key metrics to ensure employee onboarding success for employers and employees alike. By using employee onboarding metrics, companies can amplify their chances of onboarding success by:

• Identifying and mitigating pain points in the process.
• Improving escalation response time.
• Reducing the churn rate and minimizing the new hire turnover rate.
• Setting the new employees up for job and workplace satisfaction.

Essential employee onboarding KPIs and metrics to track

Implementing a data-driven approach to attain more effective onboarding can be challenging due to the sheer amount of data available. Which data is helpful and is a tool for true guidance, and which is merely a vanity metric? By focusing on the important onboarding metrics and ignoring the rest, HR can streamline efforts to achieve positive results.

Here’s a short list of onboarding metrics and KPIs to consider.

New hire engagement

Highly engaged employees are vital to the company culture and long-term viability. A productive onboarding process helps employees engage from the start and stay that way. Understanding at what level new hires are engaged can be determined through anonymous surveys, 2-way feedback, and managerial input. The higher the new employee engagement, the better your ROI in the onboarding process will likely be.

Employee training metrics

Evaluating KPIs that show the effectiveness of new hire training is key to understanding how to increase positive results. One piece of data to closely review is the training completion rate. Find it by dividing the total number of employees into the number of employees who completed training. Low completion rates may signal such issues as not enough time to complete training or too little support from management. Whatever issues you discover, you must address.

Time to productivity metrics

The time it takes for a new employee to progress from their 1st day to productively managing their role is their time to productivity. Ideally, companies want new hires to become productive as quickly as possible. The shorter the average time to productivity, the better and more effective the onboarding process is performing.

Employee satisfaction

Satisfied employees generally work harder, are more engaged, and remain with companies longer than their dissatisfied counterparts. Companies can measure new employee satisfaction by surveying and interviewing the employee and their coworkers and managers. Organizations with low employee satisfaction rates would be wise to find and fix the vulnerabilities.

New hire retention rate

Reviewing what percentage of new hires remain at an organization for a set period sheds good light on its onboarding processes. A higher retention rate gives evidence of employees’ satisfaction and employee happiness. Low new hire retention throws up red flags. The company may not be running an effective onboarding process and may instead be creating a poor onboarding experience.

New hire turnover

Losing high numbers of new hires during the onboarding phase is costly to the company and must be addressed quickly. And there’s a difference between voluntary and involuntary turnover:

• Voluntary turnover occurs when the employee chooses to leave the company. High voluntary turnover can mean the onboarding process is vague, ill-constructed, or otherwise inefficient.
• Involuntary turnover is a company-driven decision. Employees are let go by the company. High involuntary turnover can point to a recruiting and onboarding issue.

It should be a top priority to cultivate and execute a well-designed onboarding flow. Even companies accustomed to success should consistently measure onboarding metrics and KPIs to affirm they’re still on track. A data-driven approach to onboarding efforts gives unique and valuable insight into how to improve the employee onboarding process for the sake of all.

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