Employee Onboarding Best Practices and Software Compared
Bringing a new hire on board is expensive, and a rocky first few weeks can undo months of recruiting work. It doesn't have to happen that way. This guide covers onboarding practices that hold up in practice, along with three tools, BambooHR, Rippling, and Gusto, that many companies lean on to keep the process organized from day one.
Why Onboarding Actually Matters
Only 12% of employees strongly agree their company does a great job onboarding new hires, according to Gallup's workplace research. That's a low bar, and it shows up in what happens next: new hires without a structured onboarding path are far more likely to leave within the first year. SHRM has pointed to research showing employees who go through a structured onboarding program are about 69% more likely to stay with a company for three years or longer.
Turnover isn't just an HR headache. Replacing a mid-level employee can cost six to nine months of that person's salary once you count recruiting, training, and lost productivity. A new sales rep who quits after four months because nobody set up their CRM access or introduced them to their manager is a cost you can trace straight back to onboarding, not the job market.
None of this means you need an elaborate program on day one. It means the basics need to be in place before anyone signs an offer letter.
Best Onboarding Practices That Hold Up
A good onboarding process doesn't have to be fancy. It has to be consistent, and it has to start before the new hire's first day. Here's a sequence that works for most teams, whether you're hiring one person a quarter or fifty a year.
- Send a pre-boarding packet a week early. Include the offer letter, IT setup instructions, parking or remote-work details, and a simple first-day agenda. New hires who get this ahead of time show up less anxious and more prepared.
- Assign a peer buddy, not just a manager. A manager sets expectations. A buddy answers the questions nobody wants to ask their boss, like where the break room is or how to expense a coffee with a client.
- Set 30/60/90-day goals in writing. Vague goals like "get up to speed" don't help anyone. Specific ones, like "complete three client calls with a senior rep by day 30," give new hires something to measure themselves against.
- Automate the paperwork. Tax forms, direct deposit, benefits elections, and policy acknowledgments should live in a system the new hire can complete before their first meeting, not print out and hand over.
- Check in at day 7, day 30, and day 90. A short survey or a 15-minute conversation at each mark catches problems while they're still small. This new hire onboarding checklist is a decent template to start from.
Manual checklists work fine for a company of ten. Past that, most teams reach for software.
Onboarding Software Worth Considering
Practices set the plan. Software is what keeps the plan from falling apart once you're hiring more than one or two people a quarter.
BambooHR
BambooHR is built for small and mid-size companies that want one place for onboarding, time off, and basic HR records. New hires get a self-service portal to fill out personal information, sign documents, and read welcome notes from teammates before day one. The Hiring and Onboarding add-on lets you build task checklists assigned to IT, the hiring manager, and the new hire separately, so nothing falls on one person's plate. Pricing isn't published outright, BambooHR quotes based on headcount and modules, but expect a range roughly between $6 and $9 per employee per month for the Core and Pro tiers once payroll or performance add-ons are included. It's a reasonable pick for a company with 20 to 500 employees that wants HR and onboarding under one roof.
Rippling
Rippling starts with a core HR and onboarding module priced at $8 per employee per month, then lets you add payroll, benefits, and IT device management as separate line items. That structure matters for onboarding specifically: Rippling can auto-provision a new hire's laptop, Slack account, email, and software licenses the moment their offer is signed, so their tools are waiting on day one instead of being requested through a ticket. It's a strong option for companies managing remote or hybrid teams where shipping a configured laptop is part of the onboarding flow. The tradeoff is complexity. Rippling's admin console has a learning curve, and smaller teams sometimes pay for IT features they don't use yet.
Gusto
Gusto is priced more simply than the other two: Simple starts around $40 a month plus $6 per person, Plus runs about $80 a month plus $12 per person, and Premium is custom-priced for larger teams. Onboarding in Gusto centers on self-service forms, new hires enter their own W-4, I-9, and direct deposit details through a guided flow, and Gusto handles state new-hire reporting automatically once the paperwork clears. It doesn't offer the device-provisioning or IT-asset tracking that Rippling does, so it suits companies that mainly need payroll-linked onboarding rather than a full workflow engine. For a 15-person company hiring a handful of people a year, Gusto is often the cheaper, simpler choice.
Software fixes some of this. It won't fix a program built on guesswork, and a few mistakes show up again and again.
Common Onboarding Mistakes
Most of these aren't budget problems. They're planning problems.
- No first-day plan. A new hire who spends their first morning waiting on an IT ticket has already learned something about how the company operates, and it's not a good lesson.
- Treating onboarding as a single day instead of a 90-day process. A welcome lunch and a badge photo aren't onboarding. The real work, goal-setting, feedback, integration into the team, happens over weeks.
- Overloading new hires with policy documents on day one. Handing someone forty PDFs to sign before lunch guarantees none of them get read carefully.
- Skipping the manager's role. HR can set up systems, but if the direct manager doesn't show up for the first 1:1, the new hire notices. This manager's guide to onboarding covers what that first meeting should include.
- Never asking for feedback. Teams that skip a 30- or 60-day onboarding survey lose the one dataset that tells them what to fix before the next hire starts.
None of this requires a big budget. It requires picking a process and sticking to it.
Bringing Practices and Software Together
The best onboarding programs mix both pieces: practices that force clarity, like written 90-day goals, and software that removes friction, like auto-provisioned accounts or self-service tax forms. A ten-person company might get by with BambooHR and a shared checklist. A 200-person company hiring across three time zones probably needs Rippling's provisioning, or at minimum Gusto's payroll automation, paired with the same buddy system and 30/60/90 check-ins.
Pick one or two changes from this list and start there. A structured first week, a named buddy, and a system that handles the paperwork before day one will get you most of the retention benefit, no matter which software sits underneath it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How long should employee onboarding take?
Most HR teams plan for 90 days, broken into first-day basics, a 30-day check-in, and a 60- to 90-day review of goals. Gallup's engagement research suggests onboarding's effect on retention shows up well past the first week, so a one-day orientation alone won't cover it. A written 90-day plan gives new hires and managers a shared timeline.
Q: What's the difference between onboarding and orientation?
Orientation is usually a single day covering paperwork, a building tour, and introductions. Onboarding is the longer process, often 90 days, that includes goal-setting, training, manager check-ins, and integration into the team. Orientation is one piece of onboarding, not the whole thing.
Q: Is BambooHR or Gusto better for a small business?
It depends on what you need most. Gusto is generally cheaper and simpler if payroll is the main priority, starting around $40 a month plus per-person fees. BambooHR costs more but adds deeper HR recordkeeping and onboarding checklists, which starts to matter once you pass roughly 20 employees.
Q: Do I need onboarding software if I only hire a few people a year?
Not necessarily. A company hiring two or three people a year can often run a solid onboarding process with a shared checklist, a document folder, and calendar reminders for check-ins. Software starts paying off once you're hiring often enough that manual tracking becomes its own job.
Q: What's the biggest onboarding mistake companies make?
Treating it as a first-day event instead of a 90-day process. SHRM's research on structured onboarding points to the weeks after day one, goal-setting, feedback, and manager check-ins, as the stretch that actually predicts whether someone stays past their first year.