Onboarding is a crucial yet often overlooked part of the employee lifecycle. According to research published by Kallidus, great employee onboarding can improve retention by up to 82%, but 88% of organizations do not onboard well.
Yet how is the success of an onboarding program actually measured? What onboarding metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) can you use to ensure that your onboarding process is hitting the mark?
The data from your onboarding platform, HRIS or LMS can all help you gauge the effectiveness of your onboarding, and it’s important to pay attention to all forms of data—not just the numbers.
In this article, I'll walk you through several strategies you can use to streamline your employee experience, monitor new hire satisfaction, and ensure your onboarding process is optimized for success.
8 Ways to Measure Onboarding Success
1. New Hire Turnover (Voluntary and Involuntary)
Roughly ⅓ of new hires won’t make it past the first 90 days. Yet your employee turnover rate is not one static metric, it’s actually a series of data points that can help tell a story about your employee retention.
Your employee retention rate in made up of two different key metrics:
- Voluntary new hire turnover occurs when a recently hired employee chooses to leave the organization on their own, typically within the first few months of employment. This can happen due to reasons such as unmet job expectations, lack of cultural fit, better opportunities elsewhere, or dissatisfaction with the onboarding experience.
- Involuntary turnover, on the other hand, refers to the termination of an employee's employment initiated by the employer rather than the employee. This often occurs due to factors like poor performance, behavioral issues, organizational restructuring, or downsizing, rather than the employee's personal choice to leave the organization.
Any business is going to have the misfortune of hiring some employees who may look great on paper, but for one reason or another very quickly do not work out. However, if your voluntary turnover numbers are high, the problem may run much deeper and could be helped by an improved onboarding process.
By tracking your new hire retention and turnover rates, especially within the first year of employment, you'll be able to assess whether your onboarding process is likely part of the problem or not. If it seems likely, try to do more digging to uncover what the common pain points are by using an anonymous survey.
2. Time to Productivity for New Hires
How long does it take for your new employees to get up to speed? Are new employees quickly engaged and ready to solve problems, or are they working too slowly, taking a long time to learn things, and making too many mistakes for your comfort level?
To measure your employee's time to productivity, first you'll need to define what "productive" means for each role. This could include specific milestones, like completing their onboarding checklist, or it could be measured by meeting specific targets, or successfully managing tasks independently.
You can measure your employees’ time to productivity using the following method:
- Calculate the number of days it takes new hires to become productive (you'll need to define what productivity means for each role)
- Divide that number by the total number of new hires in that given period

While some roles are more complicated than others, a comprehensive onboarding program should put employees on a quick path to success. For most employees, it should be a matter of weeks, not months, before they’re approaching KPIs and performing satisfactorily in their roles, especially if they have the required skills.
If they’re not meeting these metrics then there may be a more significant issue with your onboarding program. Perhaps employees are not being taught the importance of meeting these KPIs, or perhaps there’s a deficit in training that’s leaving these employees at a standstill.
Since onboarding for managers is a little bit different, you'll want to separate them from your time to productivity analysis and use different milestones to determine once new managers are considered "productive."
3. Testing
If you’ve ever taken an exam at the end of a year-long course and struggled to retain information that you learned in the first week of study, remember that new hires are having a very similar experience.
From their first day onwards they’re bombarded with information, and it’s tough to remember everything at any given time. That’s why implementing testing into your onboarding process, such as skill-assessment tests and quizzes, can be informative.
Testing can help you determine whether your new hires fully understand their roles and how they relates to business goals. You can also quiz them on the relevant history of the company (important for customer-facing roles), or the specific benchmarks you’re expecting them to reach.
Successful quizzes are nice, but unsuccessful ones are also telling. If many employees get the same question wrong, it likely indicates that the information was either not delivered or delivered in a way that did not resonate with them. These metrics can help you make subtle tweaks to your training material to make the learning process more effective.
4. Onboarding Survey
An effective way to measure onboarding success is to survey the new hire themselves. Ask them directly whether or not they think it’s an effective onboarding process and what they think could be improved.
Often, integrating recruiting software into this process can be beneficial as it can track and manage these surveys, and use automated workflows to ensure they're conducted at optimal times during the onboarding phase.
Another alternative to automate and streamline your onboarding survey is a simple employee survey tool. They often offer templates that streamline the process considerably.
Some basic questions you may wish to include in your post-onboarding survey are:
- What was their first impression of the company?
- How has that changed in the time that they joined?
- Does the employee onboarding process accurately represent the company culture?
- Were they provided everything they needed to get off to the best possible start?
We recommend sending several mini-surveys spread out across the different onboarding phases, while the experience is still fresh in their minds. And don't limit it to only these questions. There are many other useful onboarding survey questions you should also consider asking!
Since your onboarding experience will be different for in-house and remote employees, you may want to consider sending a separate survey to ask questions about the remote onboarding process specifically.
Remember, surveys don’t always need to be named. People may hesitate to respond if they're worried about being penalized for their honesty. Anonymous surveys may help get real answers that, while they may be harder to swallow, can be a key catalyst for making meaningful changes.
5. Training Completion Rate
You may have a comprehensive training program, but if your employees aren’t engaged in the process then it likely isn’t doing you any favours.
Even if you believe that you offer a comprehensive training program for new hires, your training completion rate can indicate that training may not be as effective as you think that it is.
Take a closer look at how much training is done in a given period, and how successful employees are with that training. Then remember that they’ve just started a new job, and have a lot to learn all at once. Are you giving them enough time to review the information thoroughly, and to really let it all sink in?
If there’s an issue with incomplete training, review whether there’s enough time within the onboarding program for training at all. Do participants have a few hours undisturbed to complete online modules and review manuals, or are they expected to spend all evening studying after an already tiring day?
To help you track your training completion rate and streamline your entire training process, you may want to rely on training software, if you don't have any already.
6. Engagement Rate
Employee engagement can be a challenge for employers with a workforce at any stage, but it’s especially important when working with new hires.
The number of employees who are actively engaged with the company culture, vs. the number of employees who are checked out and watching the clock, makes a big difference when it comes to organizational success.
One comprehensive metric to assess this is the employee net promoter score (eNPS). When conducting surveys, ask employees to rate how likely they would be to recommend working with your company to a friend or colleague.
The eNPS calculation is the percentage of employees who rank you highly minus the percentage that ranks you low on the scale. Your employee NPS and can help measure the quality of the new hire experience that you’ve worked to create, as well as overall employee satisfaction.
7. Stay Interviews
We think of exit interviews as being a tool to gain knowledge before someone walks out the door, but stay interviews look at why your employees are coming in every day.
Check-in with new hires once they’ve had a chance to get settled and ask about the onboarding process and how they’re feeling in general. What worked well? What went too quickly or slowly? Were any orientation activities missed? Do they feel they need more training in any key areas?
Stay interviews can do wonders for employee retention, especially when done routinely. They show employees that you're invested and care about their future growth. More importantly, they show that you want to address problems quickly before anything grows out of control.
Don’t hesitate to ask questions and dig deeper into an employee’s answers. Once they trust that it’s truly an open forum for communication, they will be willing to provide you with the answers that you need to hear.
Learn more about stay interviews and what sort of questions you can ask.
8. Costs of Onboarding
Keeping tabs on the costs of your onboarding program can also help you monitor how successful it is. By analyzing your onboarding costs (including direct and indirect expenses), you can evaluate whether your onboarding process is delivering a strong return on investment (ROI).
Here are the different onboarding costs you should consider:
- Onboarding and training materials, such as onboarding software licenses and orientation kits.
- Training costs, including formal training sessions, certifications, or external training courses.
- Hours spent on training by managers and other team members. Remember that time is not free, especially in work environments that bill hours to clients.
- Lost productivity costs. Similar to the bullet above, there will be a temporary loss of productivity as new hires learn the ropes and require assistance from others to achieve full performance.
After analyzing these costs, you'll have a better idea of whether your onboarding strategy needs to be optimized to perhaps spread costly items (such as external training courses) out to a later time, once new hires are not so overwhelmed with new tasks. This approach can help limit initial costs until you've determined whether your new hire is going to stick around long term, or not.
Most Important? Stay Involved
There are many different ways to measure onboarding success, yet the most important thing is that you pay attention to the success of your onboarding program on at least some level.
What works can be translated to your onboarding process for independent contractors and remote employees.
While there are best practices for onboarding that will remain consistent, our onboarding process should never be a ‘set it and forget it’ situation. That approach is the same as letting your business stagnate and assuming that your sales will be as high 5 years from now with absolutely no growth or development.
Pay close attention to the efficacy of your onboarding efforts and see the impact it has on the success of your new hires and the organization in general.
For more, check out our resources on how to automate your onboarding and how to personalize employee onboarding.