Top 6 Onboarding Tools For Employees In 2023

Giving a new hire a great onboarding experience improves employee retention, engagement, and productivity.

In fact, an unenjoyable employee onboarding process leads to many employees declining job roles even before their first day.

For example, Elissa Sangster left her new company after 4 days because of a bad onboarding experience. She'd moved from ExxonMobil, looking for new adventures.

But here is what happened:

"When I showed up on the first day, the person who had hired me had gone on vacation and wasn't there. I was left in a cube for four days. Nobody talked to me, nobody came and took me to lunch. I had asked three times, "Is there something I can do?"

Four days after quitting, I called my old company and said, "Can I come back?"

When I left, the person who hired me wasn't even back from the trip."

Storyblock, for example, delivers an outstanding onboarding experience - even while growing from 30 to 140 employees per year.

How? By making smart use of tools wherever it makes sense.

Here’s what Jessica Duke, a new hire, had to say:

This article covers 6 of the best employee onboarding tools to help you turbocharge your onboarding process. 

⚙️ What are onboarding tools?

Onboarding tools are tools that 

• facilitate,
• enrich,
• or automate

 the  onboarding experience for new hires or admins.

The purpose: Helping new employees settle into the workplace. 

Main activities they can do include things like

• Surveying new hires to receive feedback and improve the process
• Giving tasks to various stakeholders and tracking completion
• Automating the send out of emails, rich learning content, or social introductions
• Scheduling events like orientation, department intros,...

🏆 The best new hire onboarding tools in 2023

Every onboarding software for new employees has unique features that contribute to a successful onboarding. There are different categories of onboarding tools. 

There are…

• Checklists
• Free tools
• Survey creation tools
• Video recording tools
• Specialized onboarding tools
• Integrated tools

1. Zavvy

Type: Complete employee onboarding software

Look: Obviously, we're biased.

But if you're looking for a "complete" solution that ties all onboarding processes together while creating a standout onboarding experience, Zavvy is your choice.

Zavvy is an employee onboarding software that helps businesses and organizations carefully manage the growth path of their employees. It could a a great fit if you are looking for a complete employee onboarding experience that helps new hires get up to speed more quickly, save time yourself, and still deliver standout experiences with a nice user interface for your new hires. Simply turn complex, repetitive processes into beautiful and rich experiences with Zavvy's automated employee onboarding process.

With its intuitive no-code workflow builder, Zavvy lets you set up complete workflows for your whole onboarding and automate them, Zavvy also allows you to do the onboarding process on Slack.

Features

Basically, you can run your complete onboarding checklist on autopilot.

That includes both tasks and more experiential elements.

A few examples:

• 🚀 Preboarding
• 🔀 Automated Workflow Management
• 📅 Automated Event Scheduling
• 👥 Buddy Programs
• 🎬  Rich Content
• 💬 Connected with other tools (Slack, Teams, etc.)
• ❓ Questions
• ☑️ Tasks to all Stakeholders

• 📈 User-Level Progress
• 📊 Company Dashboard
• 🕵️‍♀️ GDPR Compliant
• 🔑 Single Sign-On
• 📊 Detailed analytics
• ⚙️ HRMS Integration (Personio, BambooHR, etc.)
• 🤖 Training programs with AI 
• 🌱 Beyond Onboarding: Continuous Development and Training

➡️ To learn more, visit our onboarding product page or request a demo. We'd be happy to set up a free trial, as well.

Pricing

Starting price is 4 Euros per employee and month.

2. Typeform

Type: Survey and Quiz builder

Typeform is a fantastic tool if you're mainly looking to

• Collect feedback across different stages during the onboarding journey
• Create interactive quizzes so new hires can test their knowledge

The design process is fast and easy without any coding. It allows you to customize almost every aspect of your onboarding process and workflow, which make Typeform a great choice of onboarding software for your business and needs.

Successful onboarding involves a lot of learning. Providing an opportunity to receive feedback from our new hires can help you improve the onboarding process, review the tools you use and incorporate other essential activities to strengthen your onboarding experience.

With Typeform, you can collect data anonymously. It allows you to receive personalized feedback from your employees to cater to individual needs while working seamlessly with new hires.

Typeform makes it easier for Human Resource Managers to collate data and observe important feedback about the employee onboarding process to provide you insights to make informed and data-driven decisions.

Features

• Unlimited forms & surveys
• Logic Jump feature
• Data Export options

Pricing 

Typeform has a free plan with limited features. 

• Basic plan (Create interactive forms that connect to your workflow) $25/month, 
• Plus plan (makes your forms more beautiful and on-brand) $50/month 
• Business plan (Analyze performance and do more with your data) $83/month.
• Yearly subscription saves up to 17%. 

3. Loom

Type: Tutorial video creator

Loom is an asynchronous video messaging tool that makes creating videos for your onboarding process a breeze. It allows you to easily record Videos using a camera only, sharing your screen, or both.

You can use Loom to create pre-recorded videos on how to use your company's tech stack and communicate your organization's vision, culture, structure, and values. This way you won't have to give every new hire the same training. over and over again.

Using Loom to automate some of the learning experiences can go a long way to save time and improve communication with remote workers, especially for companies with a limited HR team.

Features

• Custom branding
• Engagement Insights
• Calls-to-action
• Unlimited storage 
• Recording length up to 6 hours, HD recording, click emphasis, drawing tools, custom recording size, and more

Pricing

• Starter plan is free
• Business plan (Advanced recording & analytics) - $8/month
• Enterprise (Advanced admin & security) - contact sales

4. Notion

Type: Wiki

Notion is a software program that can be a writing repository, task management software, a database, and so much more. In addition, you can connect related data to projects for easy referencing.

It allows you to share all information and guidelines needed for your onboarding process on one platform. It has an uncluttered design and a lightweight editor that lets new users focus on getting work done without interruptions.

If you're mainly looking for a place to easily document and share internal procedures and how tos - Notion may be the tool for you.

We especially like how collaborative it is: Working on documents together has never been easier.

Features

• Unlimited pages & Blocks
• Infinite hierarchy - Pages within pages within pages
• Tables & databases - Markdown Support
• Drag & Drop 

Pricing

• Personal plan (For organizing every corner of your life)- free for individuals 
• Personal Pro plan (For power users who want to do even more) - $4/month billed annually and $5/month billed monthly. 
• Team plan (Collaborate with your entire team in one place)- $8per user / month billed annually and $10 billed monthly.

5. Eduflow

Type: Learning experience management

‍Eduflow is a learning experience management software that helps organizations create courses, manage learner engagement, create deadlines, and more within a unified platform. It allows you to customize course resources with text, videos, images, and other file uploads.

Eduflow automates essential parts of the learning process. This allows onboarding courses to run smoothly and effectively. You can use it to onboard your new employees, train existing ones, and other tools while you focus on your business. 

You can quickly create structured courses and keep track of the learning progress of your new hires. To create an interactive experience, you can add assignments, tasks, and quizzes to know how much your employees have learned and how you can help them learn better.

Features

• Reporting & Statistics
• Activity Dashboard
• Learning Management
• Reporting/Analytics
• Assessment Management
• Alerts/Notifications
• Third Party Integrations
• Progress Tracking

Pricing

• The free plan is perfect for small teams, and larger teams testing out Eduflow.
• Lite plan - $20)month 
• Pro plans- $120 / month)

6. BambooHR

Type: HRIS / Task-based onboarding tool

BambooHR is an HRIS tool that companies use to run the administrative part of HR. 

It is helpful for things like hiring, onboarding, preparing, employee compensation / payroll.

If you're mainly looking to get rid of administrative tasks involved in onboarding (and you don't have an HRIS system yet), BambooHR might be a great fit.

Features - general

• Centralized employee database.
• Benefit and payroll administration.
• Employee and manager self-service.
• Global capabilities.
• Applicant tracking system.
• Time and attendance tracking.
• Document storage and management.
• eSignature.

Features - onboarding

• eSignature.
• Tasks
• Checklists
• Team introduction

Pricing

• Pricing starts at $99 per month for 12 employees. Each additional employee is $8.25 per month.

• To run payroll for your employees, you will need to pay an extra $75 per month for 10 employees. Each additional employee is $4.25 per month.

• Performance management and time tracking features are an additional $4.25 and $3.00 per employee per month, respectively.

📈 How tools can take your onboarding experience to the next level

‍

Research shows that having a great onboarding process can improve employee retention by 82% and productivity by 70%. Plus, employees with a successful onboarding experience are 18x more likely to feel committed to a company

Great onboarding tools…

• Help save time and resources required for the hiring process 
• Increase your company's productivity
• Help you quickly receive feedback on training and task given to employees
• Track and report activities within the organization
• Improve the workflow and organization of the onboarding process
• Help you build consistency in the onboarding process
• Close the knowledge gap among remote workers and increases their efficiency. 
• Bring coworkers together in one community 

The returns on investing in great onboarding tools are both short-term and long-term. 

📊 Tips for Enhancing Employee Onboarding, with Zavvy

1. Use a checklist

Onboarding software helps you achieve those goals you have set and improves your organizational structure. 

A checklist is a step-by-step arrangement of the activities and procedures put together by managers to guide new hires through their onboarding process. It ensures an orderly learning and onboarding process. 

It's your initial map of things that you wan to get done. Hence, it's where you lay out your ideal process.

You can check out our onboarding checklist to find constructive ideas.

2.  Optimize for experience, not only tasks

To really make onboarding feel meaningful to the learner, automating tasks or checklists is not enough. Instead, your onboarding should be people-oriented and experience-driven.

3. Encourage feedback 

Give new employees an opportunity to share their thoughts with you. Receiving feedback allows you to provide personalized attention to your new hires.

➡️ Successfully onboarding new hires requires a lot of work.

Make it a worthwhile investment by creating unique onboarding experiences while automating the busywork.