Who exactly is an Onboarding Specialist? (Salary, Job Description, Skills)

Who is an Onboarding Specialist?

An onboarding specialist is an employee or third party overseeing onboarding in a company.

This role can be an employee onboarding specialist, someone who oversees the onboarding process for new hires within a company.

It can also refer to a customer onboarding specialist who is responsible for helping new clients seamlessly integrate into a product or service.

In other words, an onboarding specialist —especially in SaaS— guides customers from signup to their first success. For employees, they help turn new hires from newbies into part of the company family.

What Does an Onboarding Specialist Do?

As we discussed above, there are two paths for an onboarding specialist in a company: employee onboarding or customer onboarding.

Although both of these positions deal with onboarding, they tend to differ. A lot.

So, let's take a look at both separately.

Employee Onboarding Specialist for HR Department

HR onboarding specialists focus on helping new employees adapt to the company culture, work schedule, tools, systems, and roles.

So basically, their job is to make sure new people can do their job properly.

But there is more…

They also need to deal with technical procedures like hiring paperwork and relaying company policies to new employees.

Typically, companies expect HR onboarding specialists to have recruiting and human resources experiences. 

That’s why a bachelor’s degree in human resources or a similar field would be ideal, although not compulsory.

Duties and Responsibilities of An Employee Onboarding Specialist 

• Composing emails informing new hires and existing employees of policy changes
• Explaining payrolls and benefits
• Coordinating with the IT department to set up new employees with business computers
• Introducing new hires to their new team members
• Providing manuals, guidelines, passwords, etc. for the new employees as needed
• Arranging product, service, or company demos or presentations
• Answering any queries of new employees about initial tasks
• Ensuring new employees have the necessary software and hardware 
• Organizing onboarding processes with various tools, like interactive guides, tooltips, onboarding checklists, and product tours. 

An Example Employee Onboarding Story

UserGuiding is a product adoption and onboarding tool that empowers you with all of these tools (guides, tooltips, checklists, product tours) and more! 

RAM, a package/freight delivery company from South Africa, utilizes UserGuiding to welcome and onboard their new employees.

Before UserGuiding, they faced challenges with in-person training due to their users' geographic dispersion.

After UserGuiding, they were able to provide guidance and certification without the need for classroom sessions.

Here is how they did it:

First, Sam welcomes the new user/employee to the platform 👇🏻

And then shows important features and settings around the UI and explains how they work along the way 👇🏻

And also provides a checklist to make sure nothing important is missed or skipped 👇🏻

With these guides, tooltips, and checklists, RAM has eliminated the costly and time-consuming hands-on training and switched to automated onboarding.

Read their full success story ✨

🚀And try UserGuiding for free now.

Customer Onboarding Specialist

A Customer onboarding specialist is responsible for onboarding and guiding new users or clients to achieve their first success with the product or service.

And by doing so, they are the first stronghold in the fight against the one common enemy: churn.

Thanks to a customer onboarding specialist's efforts, users/customers start on the right foot and are automatically less likely to churn.

With customer onboarding specialists, customers learn how to use products or services in a simple and effective way. After a successful onboarding, customers take an interest in the service and see for themselves how exactly it brings value to them.

Customers leave for good when they feel there is:

• No value in the service or product,
• A steep learning curve,
• Lack of interest,
• No balance between cost and effectiveness.

So, by implementing the right form of onboarding, customer onboarding specialists make it easier for customer success teams to handle customer accounts efficiently.

Duties and Responsibilities of A Customer Onboarding Specialist 

• Educating customers about the product's best practices
• Setting up customers for immediate success
• Reducing roadblocks as best as possible
• Improving product or service adoption
• Creating a loyal customer base
• Improving communication between stakeholders
• Giving customers detailed account directions
• Recording and solving customer issues, queries, and requests
• Company presentations and demos
• Creating guides, checklists, and other onboarding materials with various tools

Some key responsibilities of a customer onboarding specialist include the ones mentioned above, but these can vary significantly based on the company, industry, and customer base.

An Example Customer Onboarding Story

Flowla is a sales enablement tool that offers a wide range of features, some of which may appear complex and overwhelming to certain users initially.

They identified that many users were leaving key actions incomplete.

Features that could lead to customer success and that "Aha!" moment remained undiscovered or underutilized.

So, to increase user engagement and simplify onboarding processes, they decided to create interactive flows with UserGuiding.

Here’s what they did 👇🏻

With the interactive product tour and tooltips, Flowla eliminated user frustration during onboarding and improved its user activation rate by 24%.

👉🏻 Read Flowla’s full success story

👉🏻 And start your UserGuiding free trial!

What Skills Are Needed For Onboarding Specialists?

Although the job descriptions for an employee and customer onboarding specialist differ, an onboarding specialist’s job, in a general sense, requires the same skills.

Some of them are:

Excellent communication skills

Communication is a primary skill required for onboarding specialists.

They need to be able to convey the right information in a clear tone. Their interaction with the customer and/or the new employees should be reasonable, correct, and to the point.

 For example, it is not a good practice thing to send out 10 emails to a customer over a simple thing. It annoys the user and disturbs the customer relationship, which leads us to the second required skill; empathy.

Empathy

Empathy is one of the core skills an onboarding specialist should develop to ultimately achieve more happy customers and customer success. 

Put yourself in the shoes of a customer; what would you expect from service during the onboarding process? Questions like that help ensure better customer service.

Likewise, if an onboarding specialist can't recall back when they were first hired and put themselves in the shoes of the new hires, there would be no success in employee onboarding.

Extensive Product and Company Knowledge

Another key skill an onboarding specialist needs to have is a good grasp of product qualities and capabilities, along with the necessary technical knowledge. To be able to understand customer problems and touchpoints, having clear communications is a must.

Company knowledge and a clear understanding of the culture are also crucial since an onboarding specialist in HR will be the first person the new hires will run to when in need of an answer about the company.

Experience in Web Technologies

Experience in web technologies is essential for an onboarding specialist, especially for SaaS companies. It makes product adoption easy and quick for the customer onboarding specialist as much as for the customers they will onboard.

Likewise, onboarding new employees to the company systems and tools fall onto the shoulders of an employee onboarding specialist. Thus, technical knowledge in that area is also required.

Onboarding Specialist Salary

The salary of an onboarding specialist varies depending on the industry, experience, level of expertise, the type of company, and more. With that in mind, the most likely salary for an onboarding specialist is $57,000/yr.

Companies like IBM, Uber, and Amplify pay onboarding specialists around $78,000/yr to $89,000/yr.

The top 5 paying industries for an Onboarding Specialist in the United States are as follows:

In the United Kingdom, customer onboarding specialist salaries range between £26,000/yr – £42,000/yr, while in Australia, the average salary for a customer onboarding specialist ranges between A$63,000/yr – A$96,000/yr.

Onboarding specialist salaries vary based on job titles as well. 

For example, the most likely salary for an HR onboarding specialist in the US is $69,000/yr. That works out to be approximately $33.17 an hour.

Whereas the most likely salary of a client onboarding specialist in the US is $74,000/yr.

How Do I Become An Onboarding Specialist?

Employee Onboarding Specialist

To become an employee onboarding specialist, you need a bachelor’s degree in a related field, such as human resources management or communications.

Experience in customer service or the HR department would always be a plus, as well. 

Other qualifications you should have for this position include:

• Excellent communication skills,
• Familiarity with labor laws and legislation,
• Experience in using Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS), and
• An understanding of employee relations.

Customer Onboarding Specialist

As a customer onboarding specialist, you will be guiding clients through their software setup, goal-setting, and training. 

So, in this position, it is ideal to have:

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills,
• Interpersonal skills and
• Strong computer skills and software knowledge. 

However, with no-code onboarding solutions like UserGuiding, you only need a basic understanding of technology.

For example, UserGuiding is fully customizable and requires no coding skills, making it accessible and easy to use. 

You can create:

• Interactive guides,
• Product tours and walkthroughs,
• Onboarding checklists,
• Tooltips and hotspots,
• Announcement modals and banners,
• In-app surveys like NPS, CSAT, etc.
• In-app resource centers,
• Standalone knowledge base, and
• Standalone product updates page

Without a line of code.

Here are some examples:

A product tour created with UserGuiding 👇🏻

An onboarding checklist 👇🏻

And a tooltip 👇🏻

Want to see for yourself?

Start your free trial 🎁

To Sum Up…

Onboarding specialists are essential for ensuring both new employees and customers feel welcomed and supported.

For those aspiring to take on this role, strong communication and organizational skills –along with the right tools, of course– make it a rewarding and manageable career choice.

For companies seeking an onboarding specialist, rest assured that these professionals bring valuable expertise and support to enhance the onboarding experience!