From Paperwork to Productivity: How HR Tech is Transforming Onboarding

62% of HR professionals were working beyond their capacity last year. More than half felt their department was understaffed. And currently, as a result, HR teams spend 57% of their time on administrative tasks. So, what’s the solution?

Enter HR tech. Two-thirds of human resources professionals currently utilise technology like artificial intelligence and onboarding software at work. These systems automate repetitive manual processes to reduce workloads and boost productivity. They also give staff in this sector more time to focus on creating a positive employee onboarding experience.

The benefits speak for themselves. New hires who have a good onboarding journey feel 2.6 times more satisfied at work, and organisations see performance improvements of up to 70%.  

In this article, we delve deeper into the transformative effects of HR tech and how to effectively implement the right systems into your onboarding process.

How Does HR Tech Improve Onboarding?

HR tech improves onboarding by streamlining manual processes and freeing up HR time to create personalised employee experiences. These experiences engage new hires by:

Eliminating the Admin Burden

From contract creation to document reviews, effective HR tech replaces manual tasks with automated workflows. Minimising your HR teams’ administrative workload can lower onboarding costs by up to 80% and relieve some of the pressure, leading to happier, more motivated staff.

These workflows also improve time-to-hire, which is especially essential for high-turnover organisations. 

By investing in automated onboarding software, Southern Cross Care no longer lost out on candidates. Instead, they reduced onboarding time from over a week to just 1.5 days and successfully secured top talent in the highly competitive, candidate-scarce aged care market.

Another significant benefit is the lower risk of errors. Good HR onboarding software instantly auto-fills key details across multiple documents, saving HR teams precious time and enhancing accuracy. This is especially crucial during bulk recruitment drives where large groups of employees with different roles and requirements are being onboarded. 

Billabong’s HR team, for instance, often encountered errors while onboarding permanent and casual staff during the busy Christmas season. They spent significant time manually chasing information and paperwork, creating labour-intensive, delayed processes. 

Choosing a web-based onboarding system allowed Billabong’s candidates to enter their details online accurately from any device. For HR staff, this eliminated duplicate data entry and time wasted in paperwork processing. 

It also provided more time to spend on creating engaging employee experiences, from introducing new hires to the existing workforce to designing team-building activities that build a positive culture and align with the company’s brand.

Offering Personalisation

Automated workflows also free up time for HR teams to really focus on personalisation, with onboarding customised to each employee’s needs and preferences. For example, they create time to discover how new hires learn best. 

You can then deliver online training materials that suit this learning style, whether through videos or step-by-step guides. 93% of employees say they’d stay longer at a company that invests in their careers, highlighting the importance of learning and development for transforming retention rates. Companies with robust training see 218% higher incomes!

Alongside mobile workflows, HR tech that specialises in onboarding can also enhance communication with:

• Personalised Portals: Automatically send custom notifications reminding new hires to complete important onboarding tasks, including everything from signing offer letters to training. Contain corporate videos and messages welcoming new hires into the organisation.
• AI chatbots: Answer commonly asked questions about the onboarding process. Available out of hours so new hires can get answers straight away and aren’t left worrying. 
• Instant Messaging: Employee chat services like Slack encourage collaboration through direct messages, team channels, voice calls, and group videos.

Improving communication creates trust from the beginning, helping to build belief in your organisation’s mission and meaningful relationships with employees. New hires also feel ready to start their roles, which raises engagement and helps employees be 18% more productive.

Encouraging Onboarding from Anywhere

Using mobile onboarding tech ensures HR teams and candidates don’t need to be in the office to complete, review, sign, and approve onboarding paperwork. Automatic workflows then push approved documents through to IT, payroll, and other relevant departments for processing, making onboarding faster and more convenient. 

Operating on mobile also means candidates aren’t left waiting with little communication. Since 20% of employee turnover occurs within the first 45 days, failing to regularly update successful candidates on their onboarding progress creates frustration, causing them to look elsewhere. 

Instead, convenient mobile workflows help to secure and retain your first-choice candidates.

At the same time, new hires can complete pre-boarding and training tasks at their own pace, without feeling rushed or overwhelmed. Onboarding via mobile also shows your support for long-term flexible working. This is especially important for candidate retention, with 46% of workers surveyed saying they’re seeking a new job that provides more flexible opportunities.

Ensuring Continuous Compliance

Evolving regulations make maintaining compliance difficult during high-volume onboarding. Highly monitored industries like health and aged care often don’t have dedicated time for updating contracts and policies that reflect new regulations, which creates issues for future audits.

Smoothly integrated HR tech creates this time by automating compliance, performing work rights and qualification checks instantly. This ensures you’re only recruiting quality candidates who have the proper knowledge and skills for the job, and not wasting time. 

New hire data is often fragmented across different departments, with no centralised system or process for completing documents to the correct industry standards. But once hired, HR tech offers digital agreements and e-signatures that create a full compliance trail, ensuring you’re always audit-ready.

When Hermitage Building Group welcomed new staff, it became clear that not all were familiar with digital onboarding systems. Those with less tech knowledge required extra support to upload documents, making compliance increasingly complex. This created delays and unnecessary admin work put more pressure on HR staff.

Connecting a digital onboarding system with their ADP Payline payroll platform created one consistent, integrated process from hire to pay. It also simplified onboarding for all users, regardless of technical ability, improving efficiency and enhancing new hire first impressions.

How to Transform Your Onboarding Experience with HR Tech

Transform the employee onboarding experience by selecting and smoothly integrating HR tech into your current systems. Here are three steps to get started:

1. Assess Your Onboarding Processes

Begin by identifying your onboarding pain points, which often vary between industries. 

New Aged Care Act requirements set stricter standards for aged care providers, for example. New hire policies and procedures must be updated, while dealing with high turnover rates that impact productivity. In retail, slow manual onboarding processes mean HR teams are struggling to cope with large seasonal recruitment drives and can’t fill workforce gaps quickly enough.

See what’s working well, too. You may not need a complete overhaul of all onboarding systems. If the payroll section is currently effective, for instance, you’ll simply require tech that connects with and pushes employee data through to this system more smoothly.

2. Choose the Right Systems

Despite its importance, only 43% of workers rate their organisation’s HR tech as effective. Understanding your onboarding challenges is therefore key to selecting technology that offers the right solutions for enhancing efficiency and engaging new employees.

90% of senior-level executives believe their organisation takes these needs into account when introducing new technology, but only 53% of staff feel the same. 

So, choose correctly by considering your workforce’s unique needs, from learning and communication styles to tech expertise. For organisations where employees are often out of the office, prioritise mobile onboarding.

Whichever type of tech stack best fits your requirements, go for a best-of-breed onboarding solution. All-in-one HR systems may offer convenience for recruitment, but often lack the speed and customisation abilities to create quality onboarding experiences. They can also be complex to use, creating further delays for candidates and HR teams. 

3. Integrate Smoothly

New HR technology can cut the onboarding process down by as many as five days when used correctly. But if this tech fails to align with your existing systems, it has the opposite effect. Ensure smooth staff transitions by selecting tech that integrates seamlessly with both your existing software and workforce.

Only 50% of staff are satisfied with the resources available for learning how to use new technology. To truly transform onboarding and ensure accurate system alignment, organisations must put proper training opportunities in place when implementing new HR tech.

Transform Your Onboarding with Onboard Express

Wondering where to start with choosing HR tech that integrates smoothly and aligns with your workforce’s needs? Onboard Express’s purpose-built onboarding platform is specially designed for complex, compliance-sensitive industries.

Flexible automated workflows minimise admin and boost time-to-productivity for new hires, while adapting to your needs as they change over time. Our HR tech also offers a variety of integration partners, connecting with your current HR, IT, payroll, and recruitment systems using open API, not complex coding. 

And when it comes to training, every implementation comes with a dedicated project manager to get your HR team set up and guide them through the entire onboarding process.

Book a demo today to discover how Onboard Express can transform onboarding for your organisation.