The Impact of Onboarding and Recruitment on Employee Satisfaction

Retaining top talent today isn’t just beneficial—it’s essential. New hires must be set up for success, and employee turnover has to be kept low. The solution? A robust, structured onboarding process—preceded by successful recruitment. 

The Vital Role of Onboarding  

The cliché is real: First impressions matter. An employee’s perception of a company is formed on day one. This is when they’re most open to engaging with and committing to their new organization. So in addition to making the new hire feel welcome, well-supported, and excited to start, onboarding should provide clarity on role and skill expectations, company structure and culture, mentorship and learning opportunities, feedback and team-building mechanisms, policies and procedures, benefits and compensation, and even compliance and safety. 

It's a lot. But the stronger the employee’s foundation at the company, the faster they’ll become comfortable and productive. According to the Harvard Business Review, companies using a well-structured onboarding process enjoy 62% greater new hire productivity. Not only that, but workers will want to stick around. Brandon Hall Group attributes an 82% improvement in new hire retention to efficient onboarding, and the Society for Human Resource Management (SMHR) gets even more specific: after skillful onboarding, 69% of employees are more likely to stay for three years at a company. 

How Recruiting Firms Can Help 

Replacing an employee is expensive: as much as 16% to 213% of their yearly salary, per the Center for American Progress, due to recruiting and training costs, lost productivity, and more. It’s essential not only to get new hires contributing to the bottom line as soon as possible but also to keep them around for longer. Employee engagement = better retention = greater profitability. Gallup puts it at 21%. 

But let’s back up a step. Before an employee can be retained, they have to be attracted. Recruiters don’t just fill vacancies; they match candidates with an organization’s overall needs and goals through a variety of means. 

• Tapping into passive talent: Not everyone’s actively job-seeking. The special sauce of recruitment firms is their ability to go out and track down eager and qualified prospects who will then be up to 120% more likely to be loyal. 

• Screening for cultural fit: Through in-depth assessments, recruitment firms ensure that candidates not only possess the requisite skills but also align with a company’s mission and values. This reduces the risk of a bad hire—a common precursor to costly turnover. 

• Filling roles faster: HR departments spend around 15% of their budget on recruitment, and it can take them as long as 42 days to fill a vacancy. When recruitment firms use their reach and expertise to quickly fill positions, that’s money back in companies’ pockets. 

• Lowering expenses: Recruiting firms handle everything from sourcing and advertising to screening resumes to initial interviewing to negotiating and much more. Taking all that off an internal HR department’s plate can be worth as much as $4,700 per hiree. 

To sum up, onboarding is strategically imperative for a company to put its best face forward and set the stage for a new employee’s engagement and commitment, hopefully for the long term. And that process can be facilitated and strengthened by acquiring the best and most compatible hires in the first place, which is what quality recruitment firms specialize in.