Using GenAI to boost employee onboarding experiences in 2025
A well-designed and executed onboarding process assisted by GenAI helps employees get started faster and feel more connected to their new organisation
According to polling by Gallup, only 23% of global workers report being “engaged” in their work. Even at “best-practice organisations”, defined as companies awarded the Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award, only 70% of employees report being engaged. This disengagement has a real business impact, translating into almost $9 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report.
Disengagement can start almost immediately after an employee onboards with a company, particularly in the case of a negative experience with the onboarding process. However, a positive experience with onboarding can improve new hire retention by 82% and boost employee engagement by 54%.
| Nearform expert insight: | “Generative AI powers our onboarding solution for engineering teams. It’s a smart, interactive knowledge base and guide that’s based on a team's conversations about a specific project. With this, software engineers who join a project have access to the collective knowledge of the team. They can find answers to most of their questions at any time of the day or night without having to interrupt senior team members who are often quite busy getting things done, and without having to feel self-conscious. The result is a quicker integration with the team, a shorter learning curve, and greater engagement overall.” Dan Vanderboom, Solutions Architect, Nearform |
Opportunities to learn and grow help improve employee engagement. But In 2024, only 31% of US employees polled said that their workplace has offered options for learning.
| Definition of “engagement” | Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) founder Erik van Vulpen defines employee engagement as “the extent to which employees feel a passionate connection to the organisation, are committed to their work, and put in the extra effort.” |
| Why is engagement important? | AIHR: “People’s engagement, or lack thereof, significantly impacts every aspect of a business. It affects the quality of products and services, productivity, customer service, employee turnover, and overall wellbeing.” |
Demystifying the onboarding experience
Starting a new job can be overwhelming: massive amounts of information to wade through, pages and pages of forms to complete, policies to learn, systems to log in to…and that’s even before trying to remember the names, roles, and personalities of coworkers.
Generative AI (GenAI) can be an incredible asset for both sides of the onboarding process: the new team member and the business representatives responsible for bringing them up to speed. Instead of an HR manager sending emails with impersonal links to documents, forms and files, a GenAI-enabled assistant can guide a new hire sequentially, through the various steps. It can communicate naturally with the voice and tone of the organisation, and personalise the learning experience to ensure that the employee gets access to the tools and training that they need at the right time — and eliminate excess detail that they don’t require. In addition, employees will have 24/7 access to a helpful virtual representative that has all the aggregated knowledge of the organisation, so it can answer questions anytime.
Even a simple onboarding chatbot can save HR managers or team leaders an incredible amount of time. It can take on the tedious duties of tracking and following up to ensure documents are completed. It can also field the sometimes disruptive and time-consuming questions that newcomers ask.
With a well-designed and executed onboarding process assisted by GenAI, employees can get started faster and feel more connected to their new organisation. And, their managers can be assured that their new colleagues have what they need to be successful in their roles.
GenAI can make onboarding quicker and more enjoyable
Using GenAI can create an environment that accelerates onboarding and also increases employees’ knowledge, which, in turn, can make them feel more engaged. When both new and veteran employees are able to "chat" with an interactive bot that holds all of the company’s internal knowledge — both during onboarding and beyond — they not only feel more engaged, but it is likely that they will actually learn and retain their knowledge better.
To support our staff, and also drive positive business impact, Nearform developed a proprietary ChatGPT-based tool called “Wilde”. The tool enables employees to access information on delivery approaches and technology solutions, and gain wider perspectives on specific topics. With access to this kind of “AI coach”, an always-accessible knowledge agent, team members spend less time trying to figure out the system and more time being productive. More importantly, it can drive positive morale among teams by helping them devise more effective and innovative solutions to delivery matters, and even improve conversion rates.
The Nearform team uses Wilde effectively and successfully. The diverse and detailed responses that drew upon the collective experience of the company resulted in a win. Thus, it is not just the upfront engagement afforded by the AI tool but also the ensuing success that can contribute to a highly motivated workforce.
While there are challenges with effectively leveraging GenAI to improve employee experience, they can be managed by organisations taking a strategic approach to using the technology.
| Expert insight: | “It's not necessarily about doing our jobs for us. It's about improving how we can do our jobs and being able to do more with less, I think, so freeing up the human to do the bit that the human really needs to do and enabling the technology to do their very repeatable very automatable parts of the job”. Sam Rose, Deputy Director of Advanced Analytics and Head of Data Science and AI at the Department for Transport, United Kingdom |
| By the numbers: | - 64% of employees are likely to leave a new job within their first year after having a negative onboarding experience. - 68% of organisations are already using AI in their hiring and onboarding processes (in the USA). - A positive onboarding experience can: > Boost new hire retention by 82%, > Increase employee engagement by 54%, > Make employees 18 times more likely to feel committed to the organisation. - Companies that offer internal career and skills training programs see a 30% increase in employee engagement. - 93% of employees polled said they would stay longer at a company that invested in their careers. |
| Nearform case study: | GenAI-enabled training |
|---|---|
| Issue: | A large company needed to streamline the onboarding and training of new software engineers. Due to the large number of projects, systems, background information and project data the engineers would be working with, it was a challenge to get them all the details and information they needed in a timely and efficient manner. |
| Solution: | Nearform’s solution gathered all of the training materials, project files and wikis, recorded meeting transcripts and chat files. Users queried the chatbot with specific questions like “Who should I talk to about mobile development?” or “What kind of challenges have we had around testing this month?”, and the system reviewed all of the material and delivered the answers. |
| Impact: | - New hires were given a more comprehensive understanding of and context for complex projects. - Employees were provided anytime access to aggregated knowledge, project detail and team insights without the need to frequently interrupt busy colleagues. - New engineers and other team members were given the resources to get up to speed faster. - Staff gained the ability to generate detailed development reports and recommendations. |
The AI chatbot app was developed to be used with Microsoft Teams. However, as the inventor, Dan Vanderboom, explains, it can be adapted to work for Slack and other platforms:
| Nearform expert insight: | “One of the advantages of conversational interfaces is their beautifully simple nature, which makes it easy to plug them into dozens of existing text-based interfaces: Slack, Teams, Skype, Telegram, email… even SMS text messages. So we can meet our customers where they are, using communication tools already familiar to them.” Dan Vanderboom, Solutions Architect, Nearform |
Maintaining high engagement beyond onboarding
Data from a LinkedIn talent trends report reveals that 41% of employees will stay longer at an organisation that develops and hires talent from within.
AI can assist here as well. It can aggregate employee data to identify skill areas, generate learner profiles, suggest skill gaps that could be filled and chart learning paths to help them get to their goals. This kind of personalised learning journey wouldn’t be possible to create at scale without the assistance of AI. But with it, any employee can get the support they need to add to their skills with personally tailored subjects and learning modules that fit their learning style, interests and goals. And unlike traditional education, they can learn at their own pace and don’t need to re-study areas where they’re already proficient.
Employing these applications of AI can give organisations a competitive advantage, drawing the interest of top tech talent and other prospective employees, and encouraging them to remain. When designing and implementing a robust AI-assisted onboarding and development system, it’s helpful to enlist the expertise of a partner skilled in data and AI.
Challenges to AI onboarding implementation
As with any application of AI, there are a number of concerns and challenges to consider. The process of aggregating company and employee data to inform the AI models brings up issues surrounding proprietary data use and privacy issues. If data is not properly gathered and vetted, it could also unintentionally be biased, meaning that improper training information could promote stereotypes, inequalities, or discrimination.
Integrating company data with an AI-enabled system can prove difficult as well, considering that systems may not be compatible.
Harness the power of AI - and mitigate the risks - by working with a trusted partner
Challenges in leveraging AI can be addressed by partnering with an experienced technology partner that can develop a customised strategy, bring senior expertise in data/AI integration and utilise a proven approach to build the right solution. Nearform’s team of engineers have worked with organisations around the world to conceive the design and digital execution needed to electrify the employee onboarding experience. Contact Nearform today to discuss how we can help your enterprise.
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