HR Onboarding Challenges and How to Solve Them

Poor onboarding can leave a new hire feeling unsure in their new role. It often lowers their effectiveness, makes it harder to build relationships within the team, and significantly increases the risk of an early exit. That's why onboarding has become one of the most important processes in HR - it directly affects retention, productivity, and employee engagement.

In this article we cover the biggest challenges HR teams face today in onboarding, along with the best practices that help create modern, predictable, and effective onboarding programs.

Which HR onboarding challenges will stay with us in the coming years?

Only 12% of U.S. company representatives believe the onboarding process in their organizations is at a high level - that's a finding from "The 2023 Onboarding Survey" prepared by experts at Glean. Badly executed onboarding leads to increased turnover - as high as 50% within the first 18 months of employment. This is a fundamental challenge for organizations, because a lack of workforce stability directly raises recruitment costs, burdens teams, and slows down the delivery of business goals.

The past few years have been a real rollercoaster of change for all of us - and for organizations too. In a fast-changing reality, employee priorities are shifting as well. People still want competitive pay and a package of additional benefits, but that's no longer enough. In research by Randstad, 54% of respondents said they would quit a job if they didn't feel a sense of belonging to the organization. 42% declare they would turn down a job offer from a company whose culture isn't aligned with their values. Nearly every HR team is grappling with these challenges today.

Building employee engagement, forming strong relationships, putting more focus on employees' mental well-being, preparing people to perform their role independently - these are now the key factors an organization should take into account right from the onboarding stage. And to that whole list of challenges we have to add the remote and hybrid work model that is now firmly rooted in most companies.

Despite the many benefits of remote work, it affects organizational culture and creates distance between the company and the employee - which certainly doesn't help the onboarding process. That's why well-executed onboarding that accounts for these challenges is now one of an organization's key needs and a source of competitive advantage. A thoughtful process ensures that new team members have clarity about the scope of their responsibilities, feel satisfaction from their work, quickly become an integral part of the company, and develop their individual skills.

HR challenges: a new approach to the onboarding process

Many HR experts argue that onboarding should become a natural extension of the recruitment process. The two processes overlap and share a common goal - matching and introducing the employee so they become effective and independent in their role as quickly as possible.

Companies often don't know their employees' needs, and meeting managers' expectations is a process that takes time.

As many as 44% of new hires need more than a month to properly understand and effectively perform their duties - according to our "Onboarding in Poland 2025" report. Only 20% of companies address this problem by designing onboarding that extends beyond four weeks. The vast majority rely on training that lasts a few days, or even a single day. A one-day onboarding is the standard in as many as 15% of organizations!

That's why it's worth looking at onboarding as a process stretched over time - from the moment a candidate is informed they've been hired all the way until they reach 80-100% independence. Onboarding like this covers three key phases:

1. preboarding and organizational preparation before the first day of work,
2. introduction to the organization,
3. role-specific onboarding (introduction to the role).
   

A good practice is to involve everyone who takes part in the onboarding process - HR, managers, buddies, IT, payroll - and jointly map out the steps that make up full onboarding. This eliminates gaps, streamlines the flow of tasks, and gives new employees a consistent, predictable experience from their very first contact with the company.

HR challenges: automating the onboarding process is becoming a necessity

One of the key challenges facing HR teams is standardizing and automating most of the elements in the recruitment process and during onboarding. At a certain company scale, organizations can't afford to manually send emails, answer candidate questions, manually track every deadline, ship equipment, or collect contract data by hand. These are time-consuming tasks that require enormous effort, carry the risk of mistakes, and often overwhelm HR with sheer volume. This problem affects large organizations in particular - those employing hundreds, sometimes even thousands of people.

It can be solved with simple but effective tools that automate recruitment and onboarding processes.

Automation and digitization work brilliantly in areas such as collecting information from a new employee, ordering and configuring equipment, preparing documents, assigning tasks, or scheduling meetings and training. As a result, repetitive administrative tasks get done quickly, error-free, and always on time - regardless of the number of hires.

Such improvements significantly reduce operating costs and take the load off the people involved in the process, especially managers and team leaders, who no longer have to deal with time-consuming organizational details. Instead, they gain space for what really matters: role-specific onboarding, building relationships, and supporting the new employee in their first weeks on the job.

While the argument about cutting costs and streamlining work appeals mainly to leadership, optimizing onboarding time through automation becomes real support for managers, who get a work-ready employee faster. That translates into better team productivity and less of a burden on the rest of the team.

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HR challenges: collaboration across roles supports effective onboarding

When we talk about onboarding new employees, it's worth creating a comprehensive plan of the individual stages of the process that properly meets the needs of both the employee and the employer. Why does this matter? In the study cited earlier, 27% of employees at Polish companies admitted that during onboarding they lacked a clear introduction to their role and scope of duties.

Achieving this goal requires collaboration among different people and departments within an organization. The 4C onboarding model can be useful here - it suggests the areas a comprehensive onboarding should cover: Compliance, Culture, Connections, and Clarification. Carrying out such a plan requires the cooperation of many departments and people in the organization, such as payroll, HR, managers, buddies, administration, IT, the training team, and compliance. Even though individual activities may overlap and intersect, every team member should work toward a shared goal - preparing the new person for full effectiveness at work.

HR challenges: remote onboarding is becoming everyday reality

Remote and hybrid work have become a permanent feature of the business landscape, and many organizations now treat them as a natural operating model. In that reality, companies have to ensure onboarding works just as well for on-site employees as for those onboarded fully remotely. The key is to create a process that guarantees a consistent experience, clear communication, and a sense of belonging - no matter where the employee does their work.

To ensure equal onboarding quality for remote workers, you need to take care of several key elements that will let them step smoothly into the role and feel part of the team from day one.

Adopting the remote employee's perspective

A remote employee has a completely different perception than someone onboarded on-site. In a report on remote work, the specialists and managers surveyed who work remotely valued communication with their supervisors (82%) and team members (78%). On the other hand, the biggest downside of remote work was seen as not being able to get to know new people joining the company (over 57% negative responses). That's how remote workers see the world of work, and we should factor it into our onboarding efforts.

Daily stand-ups

A daily stand-up is a short, rhythmic meeting that lets the team keep full visibility of activities and progress - especially important in remote work. It's built on three simple questions: what did I do yesterday? what am I doing today? what's blocking me? In about 15 minutes the team syncs priorities, catches problems before they grow, and avoids long, ineffective status updates. It's one of the most effective tools for building smooth communication in a distributed environment.

Recording meetings

In sales-driven companies, call recordings help analyze the quality of customer service - but in onboarding they play an equally important role. Recording meetings, training sessions, or project presentations lets a new employee return to the material at a convenient time, catch up on things that were new or moved too fast, and better understand how the team works.

An added value is the transcription of recordings, which is automatically saved in the company knowledge base. As a result, key information isn't lost, and new employees can quickly search for the content they need without having to involve other team members. This simple solution shortens the adaptation time and relieves the manager, who no longer has to repeat the same information for every new person.

A private channel on your messaging app

A private channel in a messaging app is a great tool for running onboarding communication "live." It lets you quickly exchange information, organize tasks, share materials, and settle project details - without chaos and lost emails. For a new employee, such a channel becomes the first, safe point of contact with the team and manager: they can ask questions, get quick answers, and observe what day-to-day collaboration looks like. A dedicated channel like this significantly shortens adaptation time and strengthens the sense of belonging from the very first days.

Recurring online meetings with a larger group

Once reserved mainly for distributed teams, these are now everyday reality in most organizations. For such meetings to be effective, participants should receive an agenda in advance, clearly knowing what to expect and how to prepare. The host plays a key role - they keep the pace, manage the threads, and make sure everyone has space to speak.

It's also worth preparing and sharing a set of online meeting rules, covering things like how to take the floor, turning cameras on, using the chat, or flagging absences. Such a document streamlines collaboration and raises the quality of communication in larger groups.

One-on-one meetings with the manager

This is one of a manager's most important tools - it serves to solve problems, discuss progress, plan development, and look after employee well-being. The cadence depends on the team's needs, but 1:1 meetings should happen at least once a month, and during onboarding even more often. The key is a short agenda and an atmosphere that encourages an honest conversation. This isn't a project status - it's a space where an employee can safely raise topics that matter to them and receive real support.

An onboarding app

An onboarding app is one of the most effective tools supporting the onboarding of new employees - whether they work on-site, hybrid, or fully remote. It makes it possible to organize the entire process in one place: from checklists and schedules, through training and materials, to automatic reminders for the manager, HR, and the employee themselves.

Most importantly, an app levels out the onboarding experience. A remote worker receives the same set of information, activities, and support as an employee present in the office. This eliminates communication gaps, lost instructions, and differences that stem from "who happened to have time to explain something." As a result, every new employee - regardless of location - goes through a consistent, predictable, and engaging onboarding.

HR challenges: onboarding based on data, not intuition

In many organizations, onboarding is still designed based on intuition, personal experience, or the team's ad hoc ideas. It's rarely thought of as a process that should be measured, optimized, and scalable. As a result, companies don't know which elements of onboarding support the employee and which make their start harder. Yet measuring onboarding isn't about evaluating the new person - it's about understanding whether the environment we create actually enables them to step into the role quickly and comfortably.

A well-designed measurement system lets you check whether, in the first weeks, an employee gets the right dose of knowledge, support, and information - without pressure for immediate productivity. Unfortunately, in many companies, effectiveness early in employment gets confused with pressure for results. Expecting a newcomer to match the pace and output of people with years of experience only leads to stress, a drop in motivation, and faster burnout. The goal of measuring onboarding is something entirely different:

• spotting knowledge gaps,
• answering questions that only come up "in practice,"
• responding to the new person's needs before they grow into problems,
• monitoring the employee's well-being and the quality of their experience.

The data collected this way is not only an indicator of a new employee's well-being but also a source of knowledge for the organization. It lets you assess how onboarding works before, during, and after the process, and identify areas to optimize. Only by seeing the full picture can companies consciously improve the onboarding path and build a repeatable, predictable process that works at scale - regardless of the number of hires.

That's exactly why technology plays such a big role. Onboarding apps let you measure an employee's progress and the quality of the process itself continuously, without extra burden on the HR team or managers. An employee dashboard, integrations with CRM or ERP systems, and automatic reminders make it possible to track task completion, analyze performance, and better tailor the next stages of onboarding. As a result, onboarding becomes a process that is not only employee-friendly but also - quite simply - effective.