Hiring can feel like a gamble – but it shouldn’t be. When the process is done well, there’s usually a strong correlation between selecting the right person and seeing them perform. But even with a robust hiring process and a standout candidate, things don’t always work out. This may be because the employee chooses to leave while on probation, or because they struggle to deliver what’s needed and expected for their role.
Both of these scenarios point to the importance of effective onboarding. The bridge between hiring potential and actual performance, when an organisation either sets someone up to thrive, or risks losing them before they’ve had a chance to show what they are capable of.
Too often, the onboarding process is critically overlooked. It’s treated as an administrative checklist consisting of an HR induction, back-to-back meetings, shared documents, and no clear indicators of what success looks like in those early days of a new job. But while it’s easy to overwhelm new people with endless meetings and documentation, this is also a vital opportunity to assess and bolster key skills. Yes, people need a copy of the employee handbook and yes, they need to know about their prospective new client. But the business also needs to know exactly what skills they are bringing to the team, and to what level of competency.
New hires are in full learning mode, keen to absorb as much as the company can throw at them. Instilling the values of the organisation; equipping them with vital proprietary and industry knowledge; training them to have the right mindset for their new role: these are as much a part of onboarding as learning when payday is, or when they’re entitled to access the Cycle to Work scheme.
From checklist to journey
If a checklist is a predetermined sequence of actions to get to an endpoint, a journey acknowledges that we have a destination – yet the route we take to get there may vary from person to person. In an ideal world, a line manager would work closely with each new hire to get them up to speed whilst gaining crucial insights into that person’s skill levels and individual needs as a worker and learner. But as we know, managers are often pressed for time and may also lack the inherent empathy needed to achieve that.
What’s needed is a hybrid of personal and digital: pairing human connection with technology, AI-enabled onboarding gives the best of both. Regular touchpoints including the line manager, HR and peers play a critical role in sharing culture, values and team context. Coupling this with a tech-enabled onboarding pathway takes care of structure, consistency, and scale.
As we know, AI is very good at supplying the nuts and bolts of this process – housekeeping tasks like the provision of security passes and other essential information. It allows people to take on more of a mentoring, one-to-one approach, answering complex questions and talking about core values.
But AI can – and does – go far beyond the simple supply of handbooks and door passes. To go back to that issue of manager time constraints – it no longer takes months of relationship-building to learn an employee’s strengths, weaknesses and skill gaps. The right AI learning agent can plan unique, tailored journeys which not only deliver the information a new hire needs at the beginning of their employment, but which also identify their skills levels and target the learning they need to reach the required proficiency level – in effect, getting them to a place where they can be as productive as possible, as quickly as possible.
The road to productivity
The data on time to full productivity for new hires varies. APQC gives a range from 25 days to more than 50. Gallup suggests it can take as long as 12 months.
When onboarding includes skill diagnostics, real-time feedback, and personalised learning, you shorten the time it takes for new hires to contribute meaningfully. More importantly, the message you give to your people is that their development isn’t an afterthought but is embedded from day one. And let’s not ignore the emotional side of this. According to Gallup, only 12% of employees strongly agree that their company does a great job of onboarding. Coming into a new role and then feeling deflated by that very first experience is a massive drain on employee engagement, particularly when new hires are bursting with enthusiasm and the desire to learn.
Using AI learning agents to manage the parameters of onboarding takes the pressure off managers to be paragons of empathy. Let’s be realistic: the employee-manager relationship is both the single-most important bond in the world of work, and the main reason people leave a job. Line managers may have the time and inclination to take new hires under their wing and walk them through all the little details, whilst still making sure they’re preparing the ground for high performance. But most don’t, because they don’t have the people skills and/or the time.
But the right AI tool will supply the learning, share the key information, track what has been learned, and assess it in real time. It provides a structure for managers and employees to work within. This doesn’t preclude the need for one-to-ones or peer assessment, but it does do the heavy lifting which makes those things so much easier.
Clarity on what’s expected from day one
AI doesn’t replace the human touch, it enhances it. It enables us to deliver consistent, personalised onboarding at scale, and allows HR to focus on the more strategic, more rewarding parts of the job.
This change is particularly pronounced in learning and development, incorporating both the personalised learning journeys that we’ve already discussed, and complemented by opportunities for self-assessment and peer and manager feedback. Perhaps most importantly, it gives new hires the sense that this is a joined-up and thought-through process. The organisation wants them to succeed, and has put real time and effort into making that happen. They get clarity – on what their manager wants from them, and what the team and business need from them in the months and years to come.
Onboarding aims, among other things, to share culture – to help the individual understand what kind of business they’re working for. By leaning on AI’s capabilities, employers can demonstrate that they are, first and foremost, about a culture of growth and development: a culture perfectly placed to complement new employee enthusiasm, and to help those people evolve into the high performers that every organisation needs.
