How to retain employees with your best-ever onboarding

If you want to maintain (or gain) a competitive edge in 2025, employee retention should be one of your top priorities, regardless of your sector or market.

The global talent market is facing persistent labour shortages, growing skills gaps (especially where technology is concerned) and the struggle of the push-pull relationship between unpopular return-to-office orders and the growing demand for hybrid and remote positions. These factors are making it increasingly difficult for businesses to find top talent, so the talent you do have is suddenly looking a whole lot more valuable.

With almost a quarter of UK workers planning to leave their roles in 2025, smart businesses are rethinking their hiring and onboarding processes right now. After all, the better your onboarding, the more likely people are to stick around long term. 

Let’s take a look at how to retain employees with a range of clever employee onboarding tactics to help you boost employee retention in 2025.

Why employee retention matters

Gallup estimates that replacing leaders costs 200% of their salary, technical employees 80% and frontline workers 40% – in other words, it really does pay to hold onto your top talent!

But the expense of replacing employees is only a small part of the story. The recruitment process alone can take, on average, 8-12 weeks, without allowing for notice periods, which can be up to 12 more weeks. For more senior or specialist roles, these figures can easily be doubled. This leaves the position vacant, and means that the rest of the team are left to cover the tasks and responsibilities until a replacement starts.

But even the most experienced, talented new employee won’t be up and running on day one. The onboarding process takes time, whether that’s learning new skills, systems or simply getting acquainted with the right people in the business. 

So that’s time, money and lost productivity, all of which directly affect your bottom line. But there are also the less tangible challenges – lost morale, reduced employee wellbeing as the remaining employees take on more stress and the impact on your employer brand (your competitors will notice when they see a stream of new job announcements from your ex-employees on LinkedIn!).

Of course, turning the tide on employee turnover doesn’t happen overnight, and it takes real commitment and dedication to make it happen. While it may seem counterintuitive, we strongly recommend starting your employee retention efforts from day one as part of your employee onboarding programme.

Why employee retention starts with onboarding

If you’re only thinking about how to retain employees when they’ve started quitting in their droves, you’re too late. Prevention is better than cure, and making your workplace somewhere people want to stick around from day one will be much easier and more effective than scrambling to put things right further down the line.

Showing your new employees you care about their development and wellbeing from their very first day is a huge green flag. 93% of employees are more likely to stay with a business that invests in their career development, so why not show them that right off the bat?

An effective employee onboarding process boosts the retention of new hires by 82%.
- Brandon Hall Group, 2022

What’s more, the impact of a positive onboarding experience goes far beyond the actual onboarding period. 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experience great onboarding, which effectively doubles the average job tenure of two to four years. A strong employee onboarding experience also improves retention rates by 52%, showing that those early days really do matter.

How to retain employees with 5 top onboarding tactics

We all know that great onboarding programmes contribute to the success of an organisation, but how can they specifically drive better employee retention rates?

1. Reduce quick quitters with preboarding

A whopping 20% of employee turnover happens within the first 45 days of a new job. This is often because the role doesn’t align with the new starter’s expectations, or because the new employee is struggling to integrate with the company culture. 

Pre-job jitters are extremely common, but if the anxiety and uncertainty continue for too long, it can jeopardise the likelihood that a new employee will even make it to the end of their onboarding period. Preboarding provides new employees with useful resources before their first day, allowing them to get their feet under the table and start feeling like part of the team for a sense of belonging. This can reduce the risk of no-shows or early exits, and secure employee engagement before day one.

2. Build a structured onboarding plan

Just because you have a bunch of onboarding content, that doesn’t mean it’s sufficiently set up for success. Taking your existing onboarding content and turning it into a structured programme can make a huge difference to the employee onboarding experience. It shows you’ve put care and thought into giving new employees the best possible start, and helps keep them engaged when they’re at their most motivated and excited about their new job.

Companies with structured onboarding programmes improve new hire retention by 82%, as well as boosting productivity by over 70%. It’s a surprisingly quick win – you can take the exact same onboarding content, put it into a sensible, phased plan (such as a 30-60-90 day schedule) and watch employee retention skyrocket.

Many employees will appreciate the certainty of knowing exactly what they will be doing and when over the early weeks and months, as it will help them stay on track and not worry that they’re falling short of expectations. This can be especially helpful for neurodiverse employees, many of whom work better with structure and clarity.

3. Clarify the long-term L&D offering

L&D professionals often feel like they belong to the most overlooked department, but development couldn’t be more important for employee retention. In fact, 94% of employees say they’d stay at a company longer if the business invested in their learning and development – so yes, L&D is pretty important!

Lots of new employees will be looking to the future as soon as they join, so it can reassure them to know that there’s a plan for their development in place beyond the onboarding period. This could mean a quick tour of the LMS to show the new employee what training is on offer, showing them the schedule for upcoming development events (such as lunch and learns or team show and tells) or clarifying what L&D budget is available for external training opportunities. 

If L&D is mentioned in your job listings as an employee benefit (and if not, why not?), make sure new employees know exactly what that looks like in the onboarding period, giving them time to consider what skills they might want to develop to succeed in their new roles.

Looking for the best LMS for employee onboarding? Check out the features you should be looking for!

4. Show off your company culture

Employees who feel strongly culturally connected to their company are 4x as likely to be engaged at work, and many employees would leave their current job for a lower-paid one at a place with a better company culture (or a higher ‘emotional salary’).

Hopefully your company culture shines brightly through your recruitment process to show off your employer brand, but it’s important to reiterate that as part of the onboarding experience. New hires want to know that they’re a good cultural fit for the company, and giving them that reassurance early on will help them feel happier in their first weeks.

Your employee onboarding programme should align with your culture to avoid a confusing first impression. If you’re a fun, dynamic startup, don’t be afraid to show that! If you’re more corporate and sensible, make that clear so everyone is on the same page. Nobody likes to be blindsided, so make sure your onboarding matches up with the overall company culture for better employee engagement.

5. Gather feedback – and actually do something about it

Hardly any businesses collect feedback on their onboarding programmes – but maybe it’s time to start. Companies that collect and act on onboarding feedback improve retention by a whopping 50%, so why do so few of us actually do it? 

Gathering feedback on the onboarding process doesn’t just show that you’re listening to your employees, but it also shows a commitment to ongoing improvement. Nobody can assess your onboarding process better than someone who has just been through it themselves, and the more information you can collect, the better you can make your programme for future hires.

When you’re gathering feedback (whether this is via an automated survey within the LMS, the final task in your onboarding playlist or collected informally by the manager as part of the new hire’s probation review), it shouldn’t just focus on the onboarding programme. You should also dig deeper to find out what your new starters need next. Just because the formal onboarding programme is complete, the real onboarding period continues throughout the first year, so proactively asking what a new hire needs to support the rest of their journey will help you hold onto your new talent and make them feel heard and appreciated.