How Effective Employee Onboarding Helps You Retain and Empower Top Talent

In this blog, we explore how a well-designed onboarding journey can improve employee retention rates and turn new hires into highly engaged employees who deliver value and stay longer. We also cover:

• What is employee onboarding?
• Why does a good onboarding journey matter?
• Common onboarding challenges faced by Talent Acquisition teams.
• Ways an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can improve the onboarding experience for successful candidates.
• Case in point: How B&M utilised their ATS to improve employee retention.

What Is Employee Onboarding?

Employee onboarding is the process of getting new hires ready to start in their new role. This includes ensuring all relevant checks have been completed, the offer has been signed, and new talent is equipped with the tools, knowledge, and support they need to succeed in the organisation. Ensuring a good candidate onboarding experience goes beyond a basic welcome, it helps new employees understand company culture, connect with their teams, and feel prepared and confident that they have enough insight into the business to successfully carry out their new responsibilities from day one.

Meanwhile, for the Talent Acquisition team, the onboarding process typically includes completing administrative tasks, sharing the contracts, carrying out reference checks, collecting new employee data, and more, which can be highly susceptible to long waiting times, inefficiencies and human error if done manually.

Why Onboarding Matters More Than Ever in 2025

In 2025, employee onboarding is no longer just a box to tick. A seamless and engaging onboarding process is a competitive advantage that will help you retain highly skilled talent.

Today’s employees are looking for purpose, connection, and clarity from the moment they accept a job offer. A poor or inconsistent onboarding experience can lead to early disengagement, lost productivity, and higher turnover. On the flip side, a structured, people-first onboarding process helps new hires feel valued, aligned, and ready to contribute.

Here is some data to back the importance of good employee onboarding:

• 23% of new hires leave before their first work anniversary. (Source: Harvard Business Review).
• 44% of new joiners, who feel connected at work, recommend their workplace to others. (Source: Devlin Peck)
• Employees with an exceptional onboarding experience are 2.6 times more likely to be satisfied at work. (Source: AI HR)
• A successful onboarding process can help improve employee performance by up to 15%. Committed employees work 57% harder and are 9 times less likely to leave over the same time period. (Source: Gartner)
• Peak Performing careers sites include online onboarding content (Source: UK Candidate Attraction Report 2025)
• 74% of Companies with Highly Effective Learning Strategies Report that Learning Has a Measurable Impact on Onboarding/Time to Full Productivity (Source: Brandon Hall Group)

As seen in the data above, a good onboarding process and experience for new hires improves employee retention, boosts engagement, and productivity and reduces turnover.

Common Challenges in the Onboarding Process

Even the best hiring practices can fall short if the onboarding experience doesn’t match the candidate’s expectations, is hard to follow or outdated (carried out via post, email and spreadsheets). Many organisations still face common onboarding challenges that can negatively impact the candidate experience, employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention, for example:

• Onboarding, reliant on manual work - Talent Acquisition teams who are reliant on a paper or spreadsheet-based onboarding process are likely to run into more human error, miss out on important documents and get slowed down by the administrative burden. This needlessly prolongs the onboarding process, creating a poor experience for the new hires, the majority of whom expect a slicker, more modern process, which can be completed digitally.
• Disjointed communication - Without clear communication between in-house recruitment teams, HR, hiring managers, and IT teams, new hires may be left confused about their schedule, responsibilities, or even where to go on their first day. This lack of coordination can create anxiety and reduce early engagement.
• Inconsistent experiences - When onboarding varies from team to team, or even person to person, it can lead to confusion, missed training opportunities, and a lack of alignment with company culture and values.  
• Compliance and Security Risks - Incomplete documentation, missed policy acknowledgements, incorrectly set up tools and a lack of an audit trail can lead to compliance gaps and security vulnerabilities. An effective onboarding process ensures that all legal, compliance and operational requirements are met when onboarding every new employee.

Identifying and addressing these challenges is the first step toward building a streamlined and more effective onboarding process that supports new employees and allows for better efficiencies for the TA teams.

How an ATS Enhances the Onboarding Experience

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) with integrated onboarding functionality helps you seamlessly transition new hires from candidate to employee, all within a single platform.

Instead of juggling spreadsheets or separate HR tools, onboarding through an ATS enables you to:

• Automate onboarding tasks – Send personalised welcome emails, assign tasks to hiring managers, and trigger document requests.
• Digitally collect forms and compliance documents – Gather signed contracts, right-to-work checks, NDAs, and policy acknowledgements with secure e-signatures.
• Create structured onboarding workflows – Ensure every department knows their role in the process with configurable steps and due dates.
• Enhance the new hire experience – Provide candidates with a branded onboarding portal where they can complete paperwork, access personalised resources, and feel welcomed before day one.
• Track progress and report – Monitor completion rates, identify bottlenecks, and ensure compliance across your onboarding programme.

Platforms like Eploy’s ATS combine recruitment and onboarding into a unified solution, helping talent acquisition teams streamline the entire hiring journey.

Benefits of Using an ATS for Onboarding

Using an ATS with integrated onboarding features offers a wide range of benefits that go beyond administrative efficiency. Here’s what organisations, from SMEs to large Enterprises, can gain from an ATS that has built-in onboarding capabilities:

• Improved speed at which new hires can become a productive part of the team. This is due to the new team members having everything they need already set up during the onboarding process. This can include documents, schedules and rotas, helpful contacts, tools used in the organisation, and other relevant resources to help them hit the ground running.
• It’s an opportunity to build a consistent employer brand and EVP as part of the end-to-end recruitment process. A structured and professional onboarding experience reflects positively on your employer brand and shows new hires that you’re prepared for them. It also creates consistency between the application and onboarding processes, which, if nothing alike, can create confusion. 
• Improved scalability for your organisation’s growth. A good ATS with onboarding capability should help you replicate and scale onboarding processes without reinventing the wheel each time, while providing the freedom to configure your workflows depending on the department and even role. For example, a different workflow for an internal or external candidate. 
• Improved compliance and consistency, as an Applicant Tracking System with an onboarding module helps you keep track and ensure that all forms are collected, policies acknowledged, and all legal steps and checks have been carried out. This information is then accessible in a secure digital storage, providing organisations with an important audit trail.

Built-in tracking and reporting help TA teams get a better understanding of any bottlenecks in your onboarding process, identify delays and find new, data-driven ways to improve the process for all stakeholders.

At its peak, the Supply Chain arm was recruiting up to 250 people a week. This presented an opportunity to improve the once manual process through automation and deliver improvements in key recruitment metrics, candidate experience and employee retention.

The recrutiment process required change, due to facing challenges such as:

• Ineffectiveness of sourcing, evaluating and hiring the right talent.
• Hiring was mainly in volume through sponsored ads on a Job Board.
• Most candidates hired through the job board left not long after joining.
• £250,000 annual spend on Sponsored Job Board Ads, which fell short in delivering results.

Using Eploy’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS), the Recruitment Team utilised the recruitment platform to build recruitment workflows and take control of the end-to-end recruitment process.

B&M’s results since implementing Eploy’s ATS:

• Breaking the cycle of the £250,000 annual spend on Sponsored Job Board Ads, which fell short in delivering results.
• 225 hours saved per week on manual screening.
• Quality of hire has improved with more ‘right first time’ hires.
• Employee churn has improved by 50%.
• Absence has improved by 47%.
• Integration of Eploy with I-Trent, exporting new hire information to payroll, reducing administration and improving data collection.

Read the full case study here.