Choosing the best LMS for employee onboarding

Get it right, and employee onboarding can boost employee retention, improve your attractiveness as an employer and lead to significant increases in employee loyalty.

Get it wrong, and the whole experience can have the opposite effect.

Investing in onboarding is a surefire way to show your new employees that you care about them and their development, and the LMS plays a huge role in that process. 

So how do you find the best LMS for employee onboarding, and what features and functionality should you be looking out for?

1. An inviting look and feel

Think of your LMS as your shopfront. It will likely be one of the first systems your new employees use, so make sure it gives them the right first impression. It’s much more than slapping your logo in the corner and calling it a day – your LMS should reflect your brand in terms of the look and feel, the tone of voice and the content.

An intuitive user interface is also important when you’re welcoming a diverse range of new employees to the business. Companies like Ascent Flight Training welcome employees with varying levels of technical proficiency, so a simple, user-friendly LMS like 5app is a must. 

Choosing an LMS you can customise to fit seamlessly into your brand, that is intuitive enough for less tech-savvy new starters, will set you up for success in the early days of employee onboarding.

2. Streamlined compliance training and certifications

Compliance will always be part of the onboarding process. Whether that’s routine health and safety training, business-critical regulatory knowledge or anything in between, it’s crucial that you can prove that your new employees are informed and compliant from the very start.

Creating a dedicated compliance playlist is a great way to keep onboarding content organised, ensuring new starters know exactly where to go to complete their mandatory training.

Once it’s complete, consider issuing a certificate from the LMS to allow the employee (and the L&D team) to prove that everyone is up to date with their training. This will help with future compliance audits, and you can also automate the recertification process to ensure that everyone receives a reminder when it’s time to retake the compliance training.

3. Automated reminders and nudges

Reminders aren’t just for compliance training! Reminders, or nudges as we call them, can be fully automated for the entire onboarding period. You could send a nudge on day 1 to say hi, one to congratulate the new starter on finishing their first week and one at the end of week 2 if they haven’t yet completed their onboarding playlist.

You can tailor nudges based on the individual’s role, meaning they only see relevant content that matters to them. A new salesperson won’t be bombarded with notifications that are only relevant to the product team, and they will only be reminded to complete learning that relates to their role, location and skills.

The first few days and weeks in a new role tend to be overwhelming, with a flood of links, system emails and messages, so in-platform reminders and nudges help cut through the noise and keep the focus on what’s needed, when it’s needed, which in turn keeps the onboarding experience moving at pace.

4. Easy access to relevant content

As a newbie, the last thing you want is to dig through a labyrinth of SharePoint folders to find the right onboarding materials, or to search through the LMS to possibly, maybe, hopefully find the most useful content assets – especially for remote new starters, who can't just tap a colleague on the shoulder for help.

There are several approaches you can take to surface relevant content for onboarding:

• Playlists – Playlists pull together content around a central theme or topic (in this case, onboarding, perhaps tailored to a specific role or location). The Playlist can be saved to a new starter’s profile so they have easy access to the content, and they can see at a glance how much is left to complete.
• In-LMS content recommendations – On the LMS homepage, you can both push relevant content to new employees (by ‘featuring’ the content in a prominent position or sharing it directly with the new starter), or let the algorithm surface content it thinks will be useful (such as the ‘You might like’ block).
• AI tutor agent – Vee, 5app’s AI tutor agent, makes content discovery faster and more powerful than ever before. Instead of having to go searching for the right content, new employees can simply ask Vee a question, using natural, conversational language, and it will find the right answer from all the content uploaded to the LMS. It can also help out with coaching for reskilling, and can act as a handy ‘digital buddy’ throughout the onboarding period.
  
  

If you’re struggling to create high-quality onboarding content, an AI content authoring tool could be the answer. Instead of spending weeks piecing together an elearning course, you can submit a prompt (or an existing onboarding document, such as a PDF or PowerPoint) and turn it into a fully branded course, complete with activities and quizzes, in minutes. 

Sound good? Watch our on-demand webinar all about AI content authoring or register your interest in VeeCreate, our new AI authoring tool, to find out more!

5. Integration with other systems

The early days of bringing a new employee on board involve a lot of tedious admin. Creating employee records, setting up accounts, creating endless passwords… it’s a lot of hassle for both the new employee and the HR team responsible for getting them set up.

The best LMS for employee onboarding is one which integrates with your other systems. This could be your HRIS, such as HiBob or Workday, workforce management tools such as Oracle, external learning libraries such as LinkedIn Learning, comms tools such as Microsoft Teams, analytics tools such as Power BI or anything else you need to make your employee onboarding process run smoothly.

Integrations make the life of any HR or L&D professional ten times easier, so finding an LMS with easy integrations is a no brainer!