How to Scale Your Onboarding Process

It all starts the same way: Your onboarding process is running like a well-oiled machine. Employees feel energized by their new role, welcomed to their team, and reassured that they’ve made the right choice.

But then your headcount starts to soar, and as you move from close-knit startup to high-growth organization, the wheels start to fall off.

The paperwork spirals out of control. You’re stuck in an endless loop of sending calendar invites and nudging internal stakeholders to do their part. You need to coordinate IT setup, personalized training sessions, and compliance deadlines. And suddenly, getting employees set up for their first day feels like trying to catch a leviathan with a fishing net.

Successful onboarding at scale requires the right blend of structure, automation, and the human touch. Here’s how to build an onboarding process that scales when you’re in growth mode.

The Challenges of Scaling Onboarding as Companies Grow

A great employee onboarding process can make or break long-term retention, engagement, and performance. 

When you’re a team of 50, you can afford to take things a little slower and focus on the full, personalized white-glove experience. But when new hires are coming through the door faster than you can set up their company email address, this process doesn’t work. 

Manual processes, like looping in hiring managers, become cumbersome and unwieldy. Key paperwork starts slipping through the cracks. And new hires feel like they’re being bundled through an impersonal one-size-fits-all process where they’re at risk of becoming an afterthought.

This can lead to a cascade of challenges for HR teams:

• Employee retention problems: First impressions count — and there’s a reason why research consistently links a positive onboarding experience to reduced turnover intention. When onboarding feels disjointed and chaotic, it can signal to your new hires that your organization isn’t committed to supporting their long-term success.
• Slower time-to-ramp: Great onboarding equips your employees with the resources and knowledge they need to start contributing. But if this becomes inconsistent at scale, it can impact long-term motivation and productivity, leaving employees feeling unclear about their performance expectations. 
• Inconsistent employee experience: Without a structured approach, different teams, office locations, and managers may have their own spin on onboarding new hires — leading to inconsistent levels of knowledge and support.

“Effective onboarding is a journey, rather than an administrative process,” said Ciara Lakhani, founder and chief people officer of Elevate People, an organization offering executive coaching and HR consulting. “The outcome that really matters is that people joining are engaged and performing at their best as quickly as possible so that they can contribute to the company’s mission.”

“It can be quite straightforward for a smaller company to provide a great experience,” Lakhani added. “But as the number of managers, offices, and countries multiply, onboarding becomes more challenging. Companies are increasingly expected to ensure that the onboarding process feels human, customized, easy, and reliable — while ensuring it costs less per employee with scale.”

{{rich-highlight-1}}

6 Ways to Scale Your Onboarding Process

Scaling onboarding effectively is a balance of driving greater efficiency and making sure your employees have exactly the right tools and support to get them up to speed. 

Here are six smart ways to scale your onboarding strategy without having to reinvent the wheel.

Resource: Need a practical guide to designing the best onboarding program for your organization? Check out our free workbook 7 Steps to Transform Your Employee Onboarding Program.

1. Build preboarding workflows to get ahead of first-day pain points.

The period between an employee signing their contract and their start date can feel like a weird sort of limbo. They’ve got one foot out of the door of their old organization, and they’re excited to join yours. But the longer time wears on without a word from you, the more that excitement could morph into anxiety: When does my laptop arrive? What should I expect on my first day? Was this the right choice?

A well-designed, automated preboarding process keeps excitement high, eases first-day jitters, and leaves no room for ambiguity on what happens and when.

Depending on your onboarding workflow and organization setup, automated preboarding workflows could include:

• Providing access to key tools they’ll need on day one, such as messaging software like Slack, video conferencing tools, and the company handbook or intranet
• Automating hardware orders and setup
• Sending out ‘get to know me’ or employee preference surveys
• Automating personalized welcome emails and AI-enabled team intro videos
• Preloading their first week’s schedule with essential meetings and training sessions

2. Automate document collection and management.

Every new hire’s first day is a blur of new faces and welcome meetings with their new team members. But you really want new hires to spend the most time understanding their role, not a mountain of onboarding documentation and compliance paperwork.

Easing this burden at scale relies on automating parts of the document collection process. Streamlined compliance workflows automate contract signing and document submission before day one, meaning there’s less to worry about — on both sides.

Employees get a secure, user-friendly way to upload their documents without getting mired in complex compliance requirements. Meanwhile, HR gets a centralized digital paper trail so they can track outstanding documents and flag key compliance deadlines, minimizing the risk of delays or fines. 

This is especially important for remote organizations, where compliance becomes more complex beyond country or regional borders.

“When remote organizations scale, the logistics of adding state-specific, or even country-specific, compliance pieces can be an overwhelming task for a lean HR team,” explained Lance Robbins, head of human resources at Provivi, Inc. “Forward-thinking HR teams work with experts in multi-state and multinational employment to make sure they are nailing the compliance piece of onboarding without sacrificing location flexibility. This frees them up to focus on delivering an amazing onboarding experience, regardless of team size or geography.”

3. Create a personalized employee experience from day one.

Onboarding can easily turn into information overload for new hires. Without the right structure and personalization, new employees may feel like they’re on a conveyor belt from one training session to the next, trying to figure out what actually matters to their role and responsibilities.

“New hires are being flooded with more out-of-context information than their brains can deeply process,” Lakhani noted. “It’s so important that all onboarding language and steps resonate strongly. The second your onboarding process feels outdated, people will disengage to conserve their mental energy.”

Thoughtful application of tech can help HR teams personalize new hires’ training materials and onboarding plan without creating extra manual work. Building out onboarding categories and pathways based on department or role types ensures everyone receives access to the resources most relevant to their role and level.

“If you can personalize onboarding at least by team, employees will have a greater chance of succeeding once they start working,” said Kim Rohrer, founder and principal at Patchwork Portfolio. “Building these into the onboarding flow will help people avoid feeling overwhelmed. I suggest meeting with each department to find out what new hires need in their first month, and seeing what you can standardize and incorporate into their new hire calendar.”

This approach doesn’t just reduce redundancy and friction — it also makes onboarding feel intentional and impactful. As a result, employees only get the exact resources they need to do their jobs, reducing their time-to-productivity and boosting new hire performance.

4. Enhance team connections with a buddy system.

In a world where we increasingly collaborate on projects via digital tools and build relationships without ever meeting in person, existing employees are the key to scaling cultural assimilation and onboarding.

Implementing a buddy system is an impactful way to harness this collective effort and mentor new hires through the gauntlet of new faces and responsibilities. 

But at scale, setting up these one-on-one partnerships can quickly become a complicated game of logistics — they get difficult to track, become inconsistent across teams, and can often fall through the cracks. 

Using your HRIS to automate buddy assignments and send check-in reminders can ease the manual part of this process, while setting up dedicated Slack channels can help new hires find resources and connect with one another for peer mentoring. 

This additional layer of support and investment in new hire success is especially critical in remote organizations, said Robbins.

“In a remote digital team it's difficult to notice when someone is struggling before it's too late,” he said. “Teams should take the initiative to make sure newly onboarded team members are finding their way. Assigning an onboarding buddy is a great way to make sure new hires have an added layer of support. An onboarding buddy can be a team member in the same function or practice area, but not necessarily the same role. There's value for both parties in building connection and support when working in a remote environment.”

Cross-functional buddy setups can also be an impactful way to help new hires integrate into company culture.

“One strategy I've found super useful is assigning a buddy outside of the employee's team to foster cross-functional relationships,” said Rohrer. “The buddy has an explicit list of duties and expectations that get assigned in the onboarding software to get the new hire acclimated in a low-pressure environment.”

5. Assess your current capacity and support needs.

Onboarding at scale can often be a balancing act for HR teams. You need to create an environment where new hires are able to ramp quickly and perform at their best. But you also need to keep the lights on and maintain essential HR operations like making sure people get paid on time and providing access to benefits.

And if you’re in a lean team of one, balancing all of these competing priorities can quickly spiral without the right fail-safes in place.

“I’ve been there,” Rohrer said. “Working long and unsustainable hours because we had an employee relations issue that was about to explode, an employee with urgent medical needs relating to their benefits access, and ten new hires about to start without laptops. These are all important, and prioritization can feel impossible.”

This is why Rohrer recommends that HR teams regularly make time to reassess their current capacity, resourcing, and processes and advocate for more support when it’s needed. Think of it like a preemptive vehicle inspection that helps you spot and address looming issues before the big red ‘check engine’ light comes on. 

“Discuss priorities with your manager often — even if it’s the CEO,” Rohrer advised. “In hypergrowth, you have to be extremely clear about how much time things take, and how much capacity your team has. You might need additional part-time or temporary support to manage both onboarding and internal operations, because deprioritizing is not always an option.

“You also want to think about how you’ll continue to support this newly enlarged company after the growing phase is done, so you have to be sure to advocate for growth on your own team to meet the needs of the new company size.”

6. Measure success and drive continuous improvement.

As your organization grows, it’s important to assess whether your onboarding process is still relevant, and if it’s keeping pace with your current trajectory for growth.

One of the best ways to do this is to gather feedback and data from the employees moving through your onboarding plan. HR analytics can help you keep an eye on key performance indicators (KPIs) that highlight your overall onboarding outcomes, such as time-to-productivity, employee engagement, and retention rates.

But you can track success metrics on your onboarding process itself to help identify what’s working, what’s not, and where you can tighten things up. Metrics can include:

• Employee satisfaction: Alongside tracking employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), HR teams should also check in on the overall new hire experience. Use onboarding surveys to gauge new hires’ sense of belonging, the quality of their training, and how prepared they feel for their role. Rohrer suggests sending surveys at the close of a new hire’s first week, as well as check-ins at the 30- and 60-day marks to help identify hotspots or early attrition risks.
• New hire performance: Set a structured cadence for performance check-ins with managers at key onboarding milestones — see our 30-60-90 day onboarding template for an example of how this works. Make sure managers evaluate your new hires’ skills development and role clarity, and ask the right questions to understand their onboarding experience.
• Onboarding program completion rate: A high onboarding completion rate is the hallmark of an effective onboarding process. Track the percentage of employees that have completed your entire onboarding process. Are there any modules or areas where drop-off rates are high? Identifying these experience gaps will help ensure your process stays relevant and engaging over time. 

Viewing this data together will help you spot areas where your onboarding strategy is falling short, flag operational bottlenecks or process issues, and reduce the risk of early employee turnover.

Resource: Need a primer on which onboarding metrics to track? Get the data you need to transform your onboarding process with our free Onboarding Metrics Cheat Sheet.

{{rich-highlight-2}}