The employee talent and skills gap is growing. Only 34% of U.S. workers feel engaged, and one-third of new employees quit after six months.

Companies are struggling to acquire and maintain top talent. Signing a new hire is hard enough, but it’s just the first step for your HR and learning and development (L&D) teams.

Onboarding is often as slow and expensive a process as recruiting. Getting new employees up to speed on the culture, processes, and knowledge base of a company can cost up to 30% of a new hire’s annual salary. Meanwhile, most employees perform at only a quarter of their full productivity for the first month in their role – unsurprising given that many companies dedicate only a week or less to employee onboarding.

Optimizing your onboarding process can help reduce early turnover by as much as 25% and save the nearly $11,000 it costs to fill a new vacancy. Not only does strategic onboarding save money, but it helps boost revenue by quickly ramping new hires to peak productivity.

Your business can’t afford an onboarding bottleneck. To remain competitive, L&D decision-makers must standardize, optimize, and accelerate employee onboarding and training so that new hires become productive and add value as soon as possible.

In this guide, you’ll discover industry trends, case studies, and the essential strategies you need to achieve onboarding excellence.