15 Best Tools To Streamline Employee Onboarding

For any new employee, the experience of the first week is most crucial. A study suggests that close to 90 per cent of employees don’t get a productive onboarding program. The same study also reveals that more than 50% of employees will not leave the company if they are satisfied with the initial experience.

We have selected the 15 best employee onboarding tools that will assist you to given everything new hires need to get themselves oriented quickly.

1. Qualtrics XM

Onboarding surveys, sometimes referred to as new hire surveys, measure the new employee experience and help leaders improve the onboarding and new hire process. By gathering information from each new hire and tracking items such as satisfaction, manager feedback and the effectiveness of orientation processes, HR leaders and managers can maximise and optimise the investment they make in hiring and training new employees.

Review: G2

What do you like best?

As someone who works more with qualitative than quantitative data, I love that Qualtrics gives me lots of options to shape a survey and to collect data. Skip logic is very easy to use. There are spaces to add descriptive information and graphics. It also alerts me if a survey has a problem that might “put off” users or make it hard for them to fill out the survey. I can collect the information in a number of ways and formats–it will create PowerPoints for me, for example. And I can merge and copy surveys for different situations. All in all, it’s the best tool I have found to run surveys.

What do you dislike?

Sometimes the collaborator feature doesn’t work, and I have to be careful with some of the question types. It has cool feedback graphics–you can have users rate things by stars, for example, but some browsers block it, so I have to be aware.

 

2. Freshteam

Freshteam allows you to put together and send an onboarding kit – documents to sign, forms-to-fill, security policies or handbooks to be shared, all in a few clicks. This way you don’t have to worry about manual data entry and uploading documents to the system on the first day.

Review: GooglePlay

Great for hiring managers to stay updated on the go. I can view the interviews scheduled for me, access the candidate profiles quickly with ease and get reminded of my daily task list. Yet to try out the other aspects of the app but it’s a 5 star all the way in what I’ve been using so far.

 

3. BambooHR

When you use BambooHR® to manage employee onboarding, you focus less on formalities and more on creating better first days. BambooHR onboarding tools help you complete paperwork quickly for more meaningful introductions, let you gather electronic signatures with customizable preboarding packages, and make it easy to set new hires up in advance with welcome emails and IT checklists.

Review: G2

What do you like best?

BambooHR is easy to use for admins and employees. It allowed us to move away from housing information in many different places. It has many integrations and add-ons to suit the needs of any organization. The support team is outstanding and always helpful. BambooHR is also always working to improve and add more of what customers want. I am always excited to hear more about upcoming features from their 30/30 videos and articles.

What do you dislike?

There is no fully integrated scheduling which would be nice to have. Some features are not as good as others: only one level of approval for timesheets, leaving employee notes does not generate a notification. But the pros heavily outweigh the cons.

 

4. Gusto

Gusto’s hiring, onboarding, and engagement tools were built to help you save time while setting your team up for success from their very first day. Even if you’re remote.

With Gusto, you can create (or remove) accounts for your favorite tools with just a click. This is sometimes called software provisioning and deprovisioning. We call it a major time-saver.

Review: G2

What do you like best?

The Gusto platform is incredibly easy to use. As a people ops team of one at a startup, Gusto’s simple platform and HR resources have made it easy for me to do my job. They’ve introduced some great features recently as well, like onboarding checklists and “cashout” for employees. They also manage our healthcare benefits and have some great integration options, like with Guideline for 401(k)’s.

What do you dislike?

We started using Gusto in late 2019, and we’re on the Concierge plan. When we first became a customer, I found their customer service to be extremely responsive and helpful. However, the quality of their support has significantly decreased in recent months. The reps sound miserable, it takes MUCH longer to get a response, and sometimes the responses aren’t even helpful. I’m currently waiting to hear back about a time-sensitive tax issue and it’s been a full 10 days since I reached out. And that’s with the highest tier plan – I’m sure it’s even worse for the lower levels. I love Gusto, but if they don’t get their act together we will be forced to transfer elsewhere.

 

5. Bhoomi

Bringing together diverse systems to respond to new and changing workforce lifecycle requirements can seem expensive and complex. Boomi enables fast, secure, agile, and efficient integration to leverage existing systems while modernizing the experience for everyone.

The Boomi AtomSphere Platform allowed Moderna to speed employee onboarding by automating access to applications and resources

Review: Capterra

Overall: Boomi is a point-and-click tool that has many features across a broad functional spectrum (e.g. Enterprise Service Bus, Web Service Gateway, Managed File Transfer, Messaging). You use a drag-and-drop interface to create processes, with no coding required (though you CAN use Groovy or JavaScript when needed). What can you do with it? You can: create and consume web services; perform database CRUD operations; get/send files over FTP/SFTP; read/write JMS queues; read/write to file systems (Linux, Windows, Mainframe, etc.); send/get email; read/parse/create EDI; etc. Nearly everything you do in an IT shop to integrate systems and applications you can do via Boomi. Boomi isn’t ideal for everything. E.g. complicated ETL, voluminous file transfers, complicated processing, etc. But for the everyday IT tasks, Boomi is the perfect middleware tool. Simple tasks can be done in minutes with Boomi.

Pros: Ease of use, simplicity of the programming paradigm, and the vast capabilities of the product.

Cons: It doesn’t implement everything in a given spec (e.g. I can’t access the full request/response for a web service call; I can’t use all features of standard functionality like SMB; etc.) The tool needs to mature a bit more so that it can be leveraged more in a variety of enterprises.

 

6. CIPHR

CIPHR’s eRecruitment and onboarding solutions make it easier for you to attract, hire and bring top-quality talent into your organisation.

HR software that helps organisations attract, engage and retain their workforce more effectively.

Our self-service SaaS HR system empowers employees to manage their own data, helping busy HR teams reduce costs, streamline their processes and spend more time working strategically to add value to their organisations.

Review: Software Advice

Definitely allows us to provide more detailed management information but has not taken away a lot of the time consuming admin burden due the cost issues around all the additional modules. We found the initial training and implementation rushed and not overly user friendly. If this is your first HR Management system ensure you do your research very thoroughly.

Pros

From the sales talk everything looked perfect. It was only when it came to the post implementation stage that we realised what wasn’t included or was an additional cost. This has limited our use of the system. Help desk are generally good and supportive although a little slow on responding with a final solution.

Cons

The costs as everything seems to be an additional module with an extra cost. Not a great experience with 2 different account managers

 

7. ClearCompany

ClearCompany’s Onboarding tools are modern, easy-to-use, and efficient. Get your new hires and internal teams ready to hit the ground running before day one.

ClearCompany has helped companies identify, hire and retain thousands of A Players from among millions of applicants. In short, we help our clients reach the next level of total talent management.

Review: G2

What do you like best?

Clear company has a large amount of functionality within a simple to use interface. We use the platform as an ATS, performance management, and onboarding platform in conjunction with ADP Workforce Now software. Their robust tools are topped only by the excellent technical support their team provides. Every question or issue I’ve ever had has been resolved promptly and thoroughly. Each person that works for the company sounds like they enjoy their jobs.

What do you dislike?

ClearCompany has a steep learning curve to understand its full functionality but is plug and play for those needing a quick simple solution.

 

8. ELMO

ELMO offers a comprehensive suite of cloud HR & payroll software solutions that can be configured to whatever your organisation requires, and are available within a single dashboard and single user interface. We can help your organisation streamline HR & payroll process to increase productivity, efficiency and reduce costs.

Review: G2

Describe the project or task the provider helped with:
We are implemeting ELMO for the entire organisation

What do you like best?
The functionality and its very user friendly

What do you dislike?
Nothing as its still in implementation stage

 

9. Organimi

Organimi is a free org chart tool that makes it easy to create, share and maintain organizational charts. With no software to download, you simply use your browser to sign up for an account, then start building your org charts immediately. Organimi is cloud based, so you can access your organizational charts on any device, at any time.

Review: G2

What do you like best?

Super easy, great integration wth Active Directory, flexible, versatile a total no-brainer. Great price/quality, loving it! Easy to adminstrate with a team of colleagues. Great reporting

What do you dislike?

No dislikes, it does what it supposed to do and it is doing that really well!

 

10. Typelane

With Typelane you can offer new hires a personal experience. With its intuitive portal, you can free up time while making your company’s onboarding a delightful, simple and engaging process.

With Typelane you can streamline information gathering and make sure everything is done at the right time.

Tailor your onboarding and your portal after your brand, making it feel like a natural extension of your company.

Review: Producthunt

Effective tool for the person responsible of onboarding new employees. Even more so now when new hires start working remotely. Well done and thank you for this product!

 

11. Zenefits

Zenefits has all the HR tools that make managing your people easy, from streamlined onboarding and easy PTO tracking to org charts, performance reviews, and so much more.

Zenefits simplifies the process of curating, and providing great benefits to your people from comprehensive healthcare plans to perks like commuter benefits.

Zenefits makes paying your people fast and easy. With a few clicks, you’re done.

Review: Software Advice

Overall it’s been super positive. Mistakes are always made, but Zenefits tries to rectify and solve problems instead of throwing their hands up and saying it’s too hard.

Pros

What makes Zenefits most valuable to our business is the ease of onboarding new people and providing a 1 stop place for my HR department that is completely in the cloud and no need for reams of paper to be wasted. The PTO calendar and tracking is invaluable as well.

Cons

Zenefits started as a Benefits company with an HR platform, but has pivoted to providing Payroll as it’s core business with the other add-ons. There is still some room for improvement on the payroll side and how to handle the customer service side of this.

Reasons for Switching to Zenefits

All inquiries from my company (all 250 of them) had to go through my HR department, no matter what the issue was. It’s was not a good long term solution.

 

12. SoapBox App

Soapbox is your team’s dedicated place for collaborating on shared agendas, taking notes, sharing feedback, assigning next steps, and more.

The most valuable time a manager has with their team is in one-on-ones and team meetings. That’s why we built Soapbox: to make this crucial time more organized, efficient and meaningful.

Review: GooglePlay

Amazing! Extremely useful

 

13. Obie.ai

Obie is a suite of tools that delivers fast, accurate support for scaling teams. Obie has the most robust Slack integration in the knowledge management space, silo-busting enterprise search across cloud storage platforms, a lightning-fast FAQ knowledge format for snippets or scripts, and an intelligent Slackbot that senses support seeker’s needs, triages resolution and collects valuable analytics along the way.

Obie supports fast growing teams by finding the right answers quickly – all within Slack and your other apps.

Review: Capterra

Overall: The best part about Tasytt is that it’s incredibly easy to use; you don’t need any software or programming knowledge to create books and pages. The interface is presented in a clean and uncluttered manner, and the drag-and-drop features make populating the platform a simple and straightforward task. Furthermore, Tasytt offers great analytic tools to track employee progress as they work through their assigned documents and quizzes; this feature has been useful in measuring employee engagement. Tasytt has worked really well for our team because it is a central hub for a lot of our resources. Previously, we managed everything through Google Drive but we found it was getting very disorganized. By linking documents from the drive to Tasytt, the team is able to easily find the resources they need without getting lost in the clutter of the drive. In terms of customer service, Tasytt has proven exceptional. Anytime I used the chat service to ask a question I received a prompt response (usually immediately) and a solution to my problem. The only con I have experienced working with Tasytt so far is the inability to adjust photos. Currently, the software stretches the image to fit the page and doesn’t allow you to resize pictures. This limitation doesn’t hinder my ability to use the platform, it’s rather just a customization I’d prefer to have. Overall, Tasytt has been a great software for our team.

 

14. HR Cloud

HR Cloud’s solutions give HR teams a new advantage over past approaches. Automate manual processes. Onboard new hires more efficiently. Drive communication, collaboration, and engagement to new levels. Discover the future of HR.

HR Cloud understands the impact HR can have on the entire business. This is why we developed our solutions to overcome common business challenges, increase your competitive advantage, and provide a fast ROI

Review: G2

What do you like best?

The automatic processes. I enter a date once and the system knows which tasks to assign on the correct dates! I have manually entered all information into multiple employee information spreadsheets for several years. We also were still performing onboarding tasks manually/on paper until we decided to try HR Cloud. I would not go back for anything! I also have to rave about our Account Manager(s). They have all been fantastic. Antonela Mosic is our current one. She is quick to respond and always has an answer for me.

What do you dislike?

I do not like that Time-Off requests cannot be adjusted. If any employee needs to make an adjustment the his/her time off, he/she must delete the request and start another. I would love to see this changed in the near future.

 

15. Asana

Asana is a remote work tool that helps teams orchestrate their work, from daily tasks to strategic initiatives. With Asana, you can connect all your work in one place and bring teams together, anywhere. From lists to boards, to calendars and gantt charts, organize work your way.

Asana is the work manager for teams. But better. From the small stuff to the big picture, Asana organizes work so teams are clear what to do, why it matters, and how to get it done.

From the small stuff to the big picture, Asana organizes work so teams know what to do, why it matters, and how to get it done.

Asana bring your team’s work together in one shared space. Choose the project view that suits your style, and collaborate no matter where you are.

Review: Capterra

Overall: We use the free version of Asana as we have a small number of users, but it has become a central project management and communications tool. Because the free version is limited to 15 users, we’ve integrated this with Atlassian’s HipChat, which we received as a grant. Combined, this has been an excellent management, tracking, file sharing and centralized communications tool in an organization where people work on various platforms with different software. This has been a bit of a tough sell to folks used to working with desktop email and Outlook systems, but Asana works well on mobile devices. It also centralizes all information in a searchable database, which has proven enormously useful. However, there is a significant learning curve with Asana, which has hampered our roll-out efforts. Asana’s complexity and wide feature set can be overwhelming for the uninitiated.

Pros: Centralized project management, file sharing and search functions save a lot of time and effort by reducing the need to use email. The searchable archive has been very helpful. Overall, Asana has made project work much more efficient by keeping all relevant parties in the loop, all conversations in one place, and enabling file sharing across all devices and platforms.

Cons: Asana’s feature set and complexity requires a relatively steep learning curve for the uninitiated. That hampered roll-out efforts in my organization, along with the fact there is no desktop app for Asana. After nearly a year, I’m still figuring out all the features and best uses, so it would be nice to have a variety of case studies/examples from which to glean best practices.