Onboarding key figures

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Onboarding checklist

Increase onboarding quality with key figures & KPIs

Onboarding often sets the course for an employee's time with the company. Effective onboarding ensures new employees are quickly integrated into their new environment, both socially and professionally. But how can you tell if onboarding is a success for employees and those responsible? We'll introduce you to helpful key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to measure the quality of your onboarding.

Why you should measure your onboarding

Onboarding is one of the most important stages along the Employee Lifecycle and has a significant impact on employee satisfaction. However, providing a good onboarding experience means a great deal of administrative effort on the part of the company. Especially for HR and IT managers, hiring new colleagues involves a large number of tasks.

But how do I ensure that what was previously developed in the onboarding concept also leads to the desired success? The answer: By measuring the quality of my onboarding process. The appropriate instruments for this are key figures and KPIs.

Key performance indicators are directly measurable values or combinations of several key performance indicators. Onboarding KPIs help to make the onboarding process quantifiable and can represent both the employee and the company perspective.

The key figures can be used to identify

how efficiently the onboarding processes currently work and where there is potential for optimization.
how satisfied employees are with the induction process.

As the name suggests, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are key metrics for the company. Which metric serves as a KPI depends on the strategic goals. A KPI can be used to track progress towards achieving the respective goal.

And what should be measured? As is so often the case, there is no general answer to this question. Rather, the selected key figures must serve your purpose, i.e. be chosen based on your individual goals.

Basic goals for onboarding are:

Social integration
Technical integration
Creating a welcoming culture
Show appreciation

Depending on which goals are important to you, you should collect and analyze the corresponding key figures.

Which key figures should you keep an eye on?

There are a number of key performance indicators for onboarding that are collected in many companies. We will present the most important ones to you below.

The most important onboarding metrics

Rate of successful hires
Rate of early fluctuation
Time to environmentally operative
Time to fully operative
Number of training sessions & feedback meetings
Takeover rate
Onboarding experience

1. Rate of successful hires

This metric is the ratio of the number of people who start the job to the number of people who have signed an employment contract. The rate allows conclusions to be drawn about recruiting, but can also be used as an onboarding metric. This may sound irritating at first. But it becomes clear when you realize that onboarding does not begin on the 1st day of work, but already with the signing of the contract (You can find more about the onboarding phases here).

Another job offer, personal reasons or a bad gut feeling – the reasons for not starting a new job vary greatly. The latter in particular is a sign of a poor experience during preboarding.

If the quota is too high, you should not simply accept rejections. Instead, try to find out in a personal conversation what caused the person not to take up the new job. If the reasons lie in preboarding, the process for this phase should be improved as a matter of urgency. Regular contact with the new hires and showing them that you are looking forward to them starting soon are the key requirements here.

2. Early fluctuation rate

The early turnover rate results from the number of new starters and the number of those who leave the company again within the first weeks or months. Early turnover also has different causes that are not necessarily on the company side.

However, if employees leave the company early, this is often an indicator of low employee satisfaction. This in turn can indicate either problems in recruiting (possibly due to false promises) or in onboarding (e.g. lack of support). If you notice a high rate of early turnover, you should try to understand the reasons for this. An offboarding discussion is a good way to find out more about the reasons.

If onboarding is regularly cited as a reason, you should revise the process regardless of the question of employee satisfaction. After all, reducing early turnover also makes sense from an economic perspective. A departure can mean costs of up to €50,000 for the company. This includes direct costs (severance pay, vacation compensation, recruitment costs and the cost of onboarding new employees) and indirect costs (time spent by the HR department, lost revenue due to unfulfilled orders, etc.).

3. Time to environmentally operative

Behind "time to environmentally operative" is the time required to provide new employees with workplace equipment and all the work equipment necessary for them to get started. Work equipment includes everything needed to perform a task in the best possible way. This includes not only a desk, office chair, or laptop. The notepad, the company mobile phone, or the company car are also part of the necessary work equipment.

In many companies, procuring all work equipment still takes an enormous amount of time. Appropriate providers have to be found and punctual delivery organized. Technology has to be configured and integrated into existing MDM solutions. For HR and IT managers and office managers, all of this takes up a lot of time.

The time to environmentally operative is therefore of particular interest for the company side. Because it shows how well current processes work and whether there are optimization and, consequently, saving opportunities. But you should also check the key figure regularly with regard to your employees. If the provision regularly takes too long and employees are not ready to start by the first day of work at the latest, this usually leads to dissatisfaction.

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4. Time to fully operative

The metric "time to fully operative" indicates how long it takes for new employees to be fully operational. This value is important because your employees can only perform at their full potential from this point on.

An essential part of onboarding is professional integration. The aim is to provide new colleagues with both the equipment and the necessary know-how to carry out their respective tasks. As it allows conclusions to be drawn about how effective training and further education measures are, this key figure is important for this area of onboarding.

However, always assess the time to fully operative in context. Training in the marketing team generally requires less time than onboarding a developer. The same applies when comparing managers to “simple” employees.

5. Number of training courses & feedback discussion

When developing the onboarding concept, it is usually also determined to what extent training courses should be carried out during onboarding in order to provide employees with the necessary basics. The same applies to feedback meetings with superiors and colleagues.

As a key figure, it is recorded how many such measures were actually necessary in the end to make newcomers fit for their task. As a result, it provides information

on the quality of the training courses and discussions
whether the previously selected number corresponds to reality
on the fit between the position and the employee hired

6. Takeover rate

The acceptance rate, i.e. the number of hires who are taken on after the probationary period, is another helpful metric. As a key figure for onboarding, it also helps to classify the quality of the induction.

A low acceptance rate may indicate that the onboarding was not sufficient to integrate the new team members

to prepare them well for their task or
integrate them optimally into the company and the team.

7. Onboarding experience

Last but not least, employee satisfaction with onboarding is a key performance indicator. After all, employees should not only be trained correctly. They should also quickly feel at home in their new environment.

The NPS – Net Promoter Score – is already used in many different areas as a key figure to measure customer satisfaction. The NPS system has also been used in HR for some time to determine employee satisfaction and loyalty. The principle can be broken down further and applied to the onboarding process.

To determine the NPS at company level, employees answer the question: "Would you recommend our company as an employer to friends and acquaintances?" The answer is given on a scale from 0 to 10 (0 = strongly disagree, 10 = strongly agree). This approach can be applied analogously to onboarding.

The NPS is calculated as the difference between promoters and detractors. Employees who answer the question with 9 or 10 are considered promoters. Detractors are all those who answer with 0 to 6.

The NPS is then calculated as follows:

NPS calculation

NPS = Promoters (in percent of all respondents) - Detractors (in percent of all respondents)

The NPS value range is therefore between -100 and +100.

Improve the onboarding process with key figures and KPIs

As mentioned, which of the above key figures you use for your company depends on the objectives of onboarding. Of course, you can also use other key figures in addition to those mentioned. It is also not unusual for other metrics to be used over time. A young start-up has different requirements than an established medium-sized company.

However, a structured process is necessary in order to work with key figures in a meaningful way. Only when there are fixed processes in onboarding can key figures be used to identify weaknesses and determine developments. If your onboarding is constantly changing, comparability is hardly possible.

If you determine from your key figures that there is a need for optimization, you need to find out where the causes lie. Once it is clear what is causing the poor values, you can define targets for improvement together with your team.

Based on the objectives, concrete measures are then developed to achieve these objectives. A time frame should always be defined for achieving the objectives. This should not be too broad. Quarterly or semi-annual targets are usually a good idea.

Example: KPIs for onboarding

If, for example, it turns out that the majority of terminations occur due to a poor onboarding experience within the first 6 weeks after starting, a corresponding goal could be: "The number of terminations in the first 6 weeks after starting work should be reduced by 50% within the next 3 months."

The team realizes that feedback meetings help to allay the fears and concerns of new employees. For this reason, you decide to double the number of feedback meetings during this period.

At the end of the 3 months, you evaluate the KPIs and assess whether the chosen measure has brought the desired success.