What makes for a successful employee onboarding software? Is it a slick interface that makes everything look shiny, clean, and simple? That helps people feel better about using it, but it’s not always the most important part. Is it that it’s saving you money? That’s great, but if you still don’t have a good onboarding process after using cheap software, you’re not really saving money. When looking for a new onboarding system, be careful about falling for flashy designs and low prices. Instead, focus on these essential traits, and you won’t go wrong. 

A More Formal Introduction

Some companies like to make the work environment relaxing. Smaller companies, especially. They’ll plop a new hire down, have some fun chats about what it’s going to be like to work for them, introduce them to the team, and have them fill out forms. That’s fine in some cases, but most candidates, even if they want to work in a loose environment, want new hire onboarding to be a process, not a single meeting. In fact, 52% of new hires want to receive organized, relevant and well-timed content as part of their onboarding process, likely making it the biggest area talent acquisition can improve on.

So while you may not want to bog down a new hire with lots of information on their first day, they want to have at least some idea of what their job will be like. Additionally, having a more formal talk about the job, the company, and their place within both will make you look more professional, and make the hire more confident in their new job. Your employee onboarding software should scale to your company’s specific onboarding needs and not be a thoughtless add-on to your current technology stack.

A Simple and Intuitive Interface

The first day of a new job has enough stress associated with it without trying to wrangle complex technology in the middle of it. Around 4% of new hires quit their jobs after a disastrous first day. Help your new employee avoid the morass of frustrating screens and lengthy and extensive onboarding by providing them with a simple solution. If your onboarding needs are more complex, try selecting a solution that provides tool tips, in-app training, or a dedicated service team to assist when needed.

Many companies frustrate candidates they spent months wooing with an antiquated and disorganized system that just happened to come in the box with their ATS or HRIS. Unfortunately, these aren’t always the best options for onboarding new employees (as often this software is written for HR Pros used to navigating its intricacies). Keep this user-friendliness in mind when shopping for employee onboarding software.

Easy Integration

The last thing you want to do when you find an incredible onboarding solution is to try and stick it on to your existing technology and find it doesn’t, fit. When you find just the right tool and integrate into your current workflow, you’ll see a bump in productivity.

Instead of hoping your new purchase will work with your existing processes, build these questions into your employee onboarding software buying process. Find out which integrations your onboarding platform offers and whether or not they are open to an integration with other software platforms. If it’s proprietary or doesn’t play well with others, move on.

A Distinct Lack of Paper

Paper new hire forms are slowing everything down, not just onboarding. When you need to fill out new employee forms multiple times to file them with different departments (those multicolored forms help, but not as much as you’d like them to), and have to fill in the same fields over and over again, you can’t help but begin looking for a better way to get all that info to the right place. And it’s not just onboarding that benefits from going paperless. Estimates say banks can reduce their audits and validations efforts by almost 80% when they cut out paper. Just imagine what it can do for your onboarding process.

This one’s a no-brainer. If you’re selecting an employee onboarding software, it has to be paperless. Your new hires will appreciate how much time (and wrist pain) you’re saving them by using software that fills in fields on every form they fill out after having done it only once, and your company will appreciate that the same, accurate information is on every new hire form. This helps avoid compliance issues and risk exposure for your HR department and creates a “paper” trail for any future investigations into your hiring practices.

There’s obviously more to consider when scouting out your perfect onboarding program, but these four pillars of onboarding are crucial. When you formalize your process with the right software, it gives your company a competitive edge. When your employee onboarding software helps integrate on-the-job training into the onboarding process, you get more productive employees. And when you remove paper from the equation, everything runs just a bit smoother. With these guidelines in mind, you’ll choose the best employee onboarding software, and help make new hires feel right at home faster than ever.

Bio: Christine Marino

Christine is the Chief Revenue Officer of Click Boarding, LLC, a company that offers employee onboarding software and solutions. She is responsible for the sales, marketing and business development strategies. Leveraging her 18+ years of experience in the Human Capital Management space, Christine drives company growth through strategic partner relationships as well new customer acquisitions across the small to large enterprise markets.