What Employee Onboarding Really Costs: Up to 7 Months' Pay

Anita Wojtaś-Jakubowska

A new hire needs at least three months to get up to speed and start generating returns for the business. That ramp-up period is a real cost to the employer—several times higher than recruitment. We calculated it can reach up to seven times the average monthly salary, or more than PLN 40,000. For a company hiring 100 people a year, that adds up to a staggering PLN 4 million. And it can be 15% lower when you give managers and HR their time back and cut new-hire attrition in half with a smoother onboarding process.

When a company that hires 100 people a year loses a few tens of thousands to inefficiency, it may not turn heads. But once those numbers climb into the millions, every business leader should see a warning light. Employee onboarding is a process that touches many functions and pulls in many roles. Unlike recruitment—where it is clear what the employer pays for: the job ad, the ATS, referral fees, the recruiter’s salary—a large share of onboarding cost is far less visible. Equipment, training, and medical checks are only a sliver of it.

Nearly half of the onboarding bill is human cost—the hours your HR, people ops, managers, and teammates pour into the process. Few employers realize how much this investment in a new hire actually costs, or that it can be made leaner without losing a thing in effectiveness.

Onboarding a new hire can cost up to seven months’ salary

Gamfi’s analysis shows that the total cost of a three-month onboarding for an employee earning the national average comes to PLN 40,395. That figure covers work equipment, training, medical exams, the salaries of everyone involved in onboarding, and the new hire’s own pay (during the ramp-up period they draw a salary but are not yet fully productive).

In other words, getting a new team member ready to do their job costs the company almost seven times the average salary in Poland—and is seven times more expensive than recruitment itself (Gamfi’s estimate: PLN 5,787). An organization that hires 100 people a year is looking at roughly PLN 4 million in onboarding costs.

For companies bringing on higher-paid talent—software engineers, for example—onboarding costs run several times higher, climbing into the tens of millions.

Efficient onboarding: less work, lower turnover

Human cost accounts for 38% of the onboarding process—hundreds of hours from HR, people ops, and managers combined. The Gamfi Onboarding app frees up to 40% of that time, which translates into a 15% reduction in the cost of the entire process. For a company hiring 100 people a year, that is up to PLN 615,000 in savings.

Automating onboarding gives managers back nearly half the time they would otherwise spend walking new hires through their responsibilities and company culture—time they can instead put toward earning margin and growing revenue. The result is not just lower onboarding costs; it is higher profit.

And there is more. Market research shows that attrition among new hires after a poor onboarding experience can reach 20% within the first 45 days. A better process can cut that in half—no small thing in a tight labor market. According to Eurostat, Poland’s unemployment rate sat at just 3.4% in September 2021, one of the lowest in the EU (only Malta, Czechia, and the Netherlands posted lower).

On top of that, data from Poland’s central statistics office (GUS) showed 121,900 job vacancies reported to labor offices in that September alone—9.4% more than a year earlier. The competition for talent is only getting fiercer, and holding on to people is becoming more critical than ever.