Onboarding in 2025: The Disconnect Between HR Tech and Onboarding

Examine the additional five critical onboarding challenges that companies are anticipated to encounter: Onboarding Challenges that companies face in 2025.

The Disconnect Between HR Tech and Effective Onboarding

In today's fast-paced business landscape, effective employee onboarding has become a critical component of talent retention and organizational success. However, many companies are grappling with a significant disconnect between their HR technology and their onboarding processes. This rift can have far-reaching consequences, including poor employee experience, high turnover rates, and a lack of engagement from the very start of an employee's journey.

According to a study by Oak Engage, great employee onboarding can improve employee retention by a staggering 82%. Yet, companies often fail to leverage their HR technology effectively, resulting in fragmented, overwhelming, and compliance-risk-prone onboarding experiences for new hires. This disconnect not only undermines the initial impression and engagement of employees but also sets the stage for long-term challenges in productivity, morale, and retention.

Current Onboarding Challenges with Legacy HR Tech

Companies today face significant hurdles in delivering an effective and engaging onboarding experience due to outdated and disconnected HR technology. A major pain point is the prevalence of manual workflows and excessive paperwork, leading to inefficiencies, delays, and a subpar employee experience. Data silos across disparate systems also hinder collaboration between HR, IT, and hiring managers, resulting in a fragmented and overwhelming process for new hires.

Legacy HR tech stacks often lack seamless integrations, creating a disjointed employee experience that fails to provide a cohesive, personalized journey. This disconnect can lead to compliance risks, as critical information and tasks fall through the cracks. Moreover, companies struggle to gain insights into the effectiveness of their onboarding programs due to a lack of centralized data and analytics capabilities within their existing systems.

Evolving Onboarding Needs by 2025

As we approach 2025, the landscape of onboarding is poised for significant transformation. Organizations must brace themselves for evolving employee expectations and harness the power of technology to deliver a seamless, personalized experience. According to Appical's 2024 HR Onboarding Trends, one of the key shifts will be the demand for digital-first onboarding experiences tailored to individual needs.

Frequent feedback cycles will become the norm, enabling continuous improvement and fostering a two-way dialogue between employees and employers. The rise of hybrid and remote work models will necessitate a reimagining of onboarding processes, ensuring a consistent and engaging experience regardless of physical location. Additionally, dynamic career paths and continuous learning will take center stage, requiring onboarding programs to be agile and adaptable.

Perhaps most significantly, data-driven automation will play a pivotal role in streamlining and optimizing onboarding workflows. HR Executive’s HR Transformation predictions for 2025 highlight the increasing adoption of AI and machine learning to personalize experiences, automate routine tasks, and glean valuable insights from onboarding data.

Root Causes of the HR Tech-Onboarding Disconnect

The disconnect between HR technology and effective onboarding processes often stems from several root causes. One major factor is the prevalence of legacy systems with fragmented capabilities that were not designed for seamless integration or end-to-end onboarding workflows. These systems create data silos and manual handoffs, leading to a disjointed experience.

Additionally, there is often a lack of integration between the various point solutions and tools used for different HR functions like recruiting, onboarding, and employee management. Disparate systems struggle to share data and collaborate effectively, resulting in process inefficiencies and gaps.

Organizational silos and misalignment between IT and HR teams can also contribute to the rift. When these departments operate in isolation, it becomes challenging to align technology solutions with evolving onboarding needs and design user-centric experiences.

Furthermore, the rapidly changing nature of onboarding requirements, driven by factors like remote work, personalization demands, and dynamic career paths, can outpace the capabilities of legacy HR tech. Rigid, monolithic systems often lack the flexibility and agility to adapt to these evolving needs.

Finally, a lack of user-centric design principles in many HR software solutions can lead to poor adoption and ineffective onboarding experiences. Systems that are not intuitive, mobile-friendly, or tailored to the specific needs of various stakeholders (HR, managers, employees) can create frustration and disengagement.

Core HR System Integration Points

To create a seamless onboarding experience, companies must identify the core HR systems that need to integrate with their onboarding technology. These typically include:

• Human Resources Information System (HRIS): The central repository for employee data, including personal information, job details, and compensation records.
• Applicant Tracking System (ATS): Used for recruitment and hiring, the ATS is the starting point for the onboarding process, providing new hire data.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM): Handles user provisioning, authentication, and access control for various business applications.
• Learning Management System (LMS): Delivers training and development content, which is crucial for onboarding new employees.
• Performance Management System: Tracks employee goals, feedback, and performance reviews, integrating with onboarding for setting initial objectives.
• Performance Support System: Technology-based solution designed to provide real-time, on-demand help and guidance to users.
• The key integration points for onboarding technology involve seamlessly exchanging data and triggering workflows across these core HR systems.

Building an Onboarding Hub

To centralize onboarding and unify data and workflows across disparate HR systems, companies should implement an onboarding hub. An onboarding hub acts as a central platform that integrates with core HR technologies like the HRIS, applicant tracking system, identity management tools, and learning management system. By connecting these systems, the onboarding hub can orchestrate end-to-end processes, automate handoffs between teams, and provide a single pane of glass for new hires.

Within the onboarding hub, HR teams can define unified data models and workflows that span the entire employee lifecycle, from recruitment to onboarding, development, and offboarding. New hire data only needs to be entered once and then flows through connected systems. The hub ensures consistency and eliminates silos of duplicative information spread across disconnected tools. Managers and new hires gain visibility into onboarding tasks, requirements, and status through a centralized portal.

Defining Integration Requirements

Achieving a unified onboarding experience starts with clearly defining integration requirements upfront and getting stakeholder alignment. According to OmniHR, "Before implementing any integrations, it's important to document all of your integration needs and get stakeholder buy-in."

HR teams should work closely with IT, managers, and other stakeholders involved in onboarding to map out all the systems, data flows, and handoffs that need to be connected. Identify pain points in the current process and opportunities for automation. Thoroughly document integration requirements, priorities, and goals to ensure all parties are aligned.

It's also crucial to understand the capabilities and limitations of existing HR systems when it comes to integration. As Outsail advises, "Audit your HR tech stack and understand which tools have open APIs and which ones don't allow for third-party integrations." This will impact your integration strategy and tool selection down the line.

System Integration Approaches

Connecting disparate HR systems requires leveraging APIs, automation tools, and dedicated integration platforms. According to Merge's guide to HRIS integrations, most modern HR software exposes APIs that enable data synchronization and process automation between systems. Companies can build custom integrations using these APIs to exchange data bi-directionally and trigger workflows across recruitment, onboarding, benefits, payroll, and other core HR functions.

Another approach highlighted in Workato's HR integration guide is to leverage integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solutions. These cloud-based platforms provide pre-built connectors and low-code/no-code tools to rapidly connect HR applications without extensive development. iPaaS tools can automate data flows, map fields across systems, and orchestrate multi-step processes spanning multiple HR technologies.

Robotic process automation (RPA) bots offer an alternative integration method for syncing data and automating tasks across HR systems, as described in Outsail's HR integration best practices. RPA scripts can interface directly with application UIs to extract data, populate forms, trigger events, and transfer information between recruitment tools, HCM platforms, payroll systems, and more.

Measuring Onboarding Success

To gauge the effectiveness of an integrated onboarding experience, companies should track key metrics and adjust their approach based on the results. Some critical onboarding metrics to monitor include:

• New hire job satisfaction: Surveying new employees on their overall satisfaction with the onboarding process can provide valuable insights. A positive onboarding experience is linked to higher engagement and retention.
• Time to productivity: Measuring how quickly new hires ramp up and become fully productive can indicate the efficiency of the onboarding program. Tightly integrated systems can help accelerate this timeline.
• Employee turnover: High attrition rates, especially within the first year, may signal onboarding deficiencies that need to be addressed.
• Compliance and consistency: Ensuring all new hires complete the required training and documentation is critical. Automated workflows can help enforce consistency across the organization.

By continuously monitoring these and other relevant metrics, companies can identify areas for improvement and refine their onboarding approach to create a seamless, engaging experience for new employees.

The Unified Onboarding Experience

Unifying the onboarding experience requires a strategic approach to integrating core HR systems with onboarding technology. By following a few key steps, companies can create a seamless journey that improves the employee experience, boosts productivity, and reduces turnover:

• Define integration requirements upfront, aligning stakeholders on goals for data sharing and workflow automation across recruitment, HR, IT, and management systems.
• Consolidate and clean up HR data, developing a unified data model to ensure consistent information flows between systems.
• Leverage APIs, automation tools, and platforms like employee onboarding software to connect disparate systems and streamline handoffs between teams.
• Implement an onboarding hub that gives new hires and managers visibility into their tasks and progress, while providing a centralized location for resources and communications.
• Continuously measure onboarding metrics like time-to-productivity, engagement scores, and retention rates, iterating on the integration strategy as needed.

With a tightly integrated onboarding experience, companies can improve the employee experience, accelerate time-to-impact for new hires, and increase overall workforce productivity and retention.