5 Ways to Reduce Onboarding Costs of New Employees

Hiring new employees is a big deal.

It always means fresh perspective, new blood, new dynamics, new specialties, and, naturally, interrupted workflows, confusion, and a fair amount of time spent training.

However, beyond all this, are you aware of what it actually costs your business to get a brand-new hire?

Most probably, no.

Surprisingly, the cost of onboarding new employees could turn out to be much more expensive than onboarding new clients!

This is why you need to come up with effective and creative ways to cut down on onboarding and training costs - and this article will help you do just that.✨

By using methods like repeatable processes, digital adoption platforms, trying group training, mentoring, or decreasing the time to productivity, you can easily reduce the onboarding costs of new employees.

Let's begin without further due.

Here are five ways to significantly reduce employee onboarding and training expenses.

1- Create a Repeatable Process

Creating repeatable content is the key to the ultimate reduction in onboarding costs. This shouldn't come as a surprise since it's a great way to save both effort and time to offer new and different people the same, repeatable, and effective walkthrough experience.

Here's an example. 

By creating interactive -and repeatable- guides for your onboarding processes -software onboarding for this example's case-  you can easily scale, track, and manage the prep time for every one of your employee's onboarding and make sure it's a seamless and minimal experience. 

I can hear you asking the question ''How?''

The best way to create these repeatable guides is through the help of a digital adoption platform, which will speed up your tech training processes. Let's move on to the next step to learn more about it. 

2- Use a Digital Adoption Platform to Speed Up Tech Training

The most effective way to offer repeatable guides is to use a Digital Adoption Platform like UserGuiding Now. 

UserGuiding Now is a Google Chrome Extension that allows UserGuiding to be installed within a website page when the visitor has limited access to the specific source code of their platform page.

Basically, it's an extension that works best for your onboarding material and helps you onboard your users/employees to ANY software without requiring developers and their access to the onboarding software.

It's quite a simple process.

Here's an example done by my precious colleague Serra. She used the tool to start creating a guide on Asana's dashboard. For the first step, she started with a cute welcome modal, as seen above. 

You can also add tooltips, hotspots, or even an onboarding checklist for your preference. 

And here's the result after about 5 minutes. 

Later on, you can easily configure changes and publish with UserGuiding Now. All you need to do is go back to the UserGuiding panel and, turn your guide into active, then publish. 

For it to work smoothly, you need to go to Settings and Containers. There, you will find your container code which is necessary for the UG Now verification field.

Finally, you need to insert the link of the page you want the onboarding to happen, and there you go. 

Long story short, your users can easily download and configure UG Now in just a few minutes to view the onboarding material you have created for them - and you can use UG Now for a demo or live preview purposes in addition to your employee onboarding processes. Start now, today.

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3- Conduct Group Training and Onboarding

Another easy and effective way to cut average costs -and keep it non-digital- is group training and onboarding sessions. As you can imagine, social environments where new employees can meet others like themselves and socialize are a great way to find comfort and fun in their training and hiring process.

As long as these group training sessions are interactive and engaging, there's no doubt that the majority of employees will be involved in a built-in team cohesion that delivers great value. 

You can always try and do some fun icebreakers and make them creative, interactive, and fun enough to build team spirit and make your newcomers feel like they're slowly becoming a part of something bigger than themselves - their new work culture. 

This way, you'll be able to save time, resources, and money while offering a sincere welcome and building an engaging work environment. 

4- Be a Mentor

It's a universal fact that companies worldwide spend billions of dollars on training and onboarding new employees.

Another effective way to avoid this amount of loss is to start using existing resources by pairing new employees with current employees and making them interact within the scope of a professional mentoring experience. 

This one costs you absolutely nothing and is a great way to encourage a supportive and warm atmosphere for your new and old employees. It also comes extremely helpful in on-the-job training - being perfectly sensible to pair a new employee with an experienced one in the same position.

5- Reduce Time to Productivity

Unfortunately, towards the end of your onboarding process, even the ''fully onboarded'' employees may not always be 100% productive.  They may not yet be capable of using time efficiently, creatively solving problems, or knowing when and how to ask for help.

These factors indicate that your employees have not yet fully become a part of the overall company culture. 

This usually happens when there are many new employees and not enough diverse employee training programs are involved. By changing these programs into powerful knowledge bases, you can let your employees participate at their own pace and keep learning in the best ways for them.

Putting all the relevant knowledge in one place saves time by getting your employees into their positions and roles in the first couple of days.

Once the employees are provided with the tools and knowledge they need, they instantly become more productive, and everybody else interacts with them. 

Final Words

Undoubtedly, onboarding your new employees can be very costly and time-consuming for your company. 

This process mostly involves everything from scratch - writing job advertisements, conducting interviews, examining background checks, training, organizing, and more. 

No matter how hard it seems, it would be best if you didn't neglect it since each, and every person that becomes a member of your company culture impacts your overall growth. This is why you always need to offer a solid onboarding process for your people while being careful about your budget and doing what you can to lower your expenses. 

It isn't easy, but it can be done with these important steps, lots of commitment, and devotion!