The Future of Employee Onboarding: 2025 Trends

Are you planning to open up hiring in 2025? If you’re not fully prepared for it, scaling recruitment can quickly put a damper on your candidate experience and lead to operational overload for your team. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Workplace trends around AI, automation, and hybrid work can and should be used to your advantage as you develop your 2025 employee onboarding strategy. In this article we’ll dive into the top five onboarding trends you and your team should know about.

Automation: The Foundation of Scalable Onboarding

The conversation around automation in HR has been around for more than two decades. But the difference now is short-staffed HR departments will be a forcing function to fully automate onboarding processes. A recent SHRM report found more than half of HR professionals feel they are working beyond their typical capacity or are short-staffed for their workload.

Another reason we see automation at the forefront of onboarding in 2025 is pressure from the top. In Gartner’s recent CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey, “cost management” as a priority increased 69% year over year. 

We recommend leaning into technology to automate the necessary compliance tasks of onboarding like provisioning and access to IT assets and tools. That way your team can focus on higher level, more strategic work. Check out O.C. Tanner’s automation story for some inspiration – and how they save more than $150,000 annually.

The workforce and cost management became a higher priority for CEOs and senior business executives this year.

AI: A Smart Guide Through Onboarding

SHRM predicts that by next year half of HR departments could be using AI in their work. And for onboarding, this is about more than just a bot answering general HR questions. AI has the potential to drastically improve efficiency, helping guide the onboarding process and ramp your new hires to productivity more quickly in their first days and weeks.

If the AI space is new for you and your company, HR tech analyst Josh Bersin suggests these thought starters:

• How do you manage the quality, governance, and real-time updating of content?
• How do you manage security?
• How do you train and monitor your systems for bias?
• Is your HR and IT team set up to innovate and scale?

He also suggests creating a SWAT team of emerging experts within your organization to stay aligned and share ideas.

Skills and Learning: Begin Before Day One

Korn Ferry estimates the global talent shortage costs $8.5 trillion globally. By 2030, more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled people to take them. So what does that have to do with onboarding?

Onboarding will increasingly be seen as a vehicle to get new hires “certified” on skills and standard operating procedures through awareness and comprehension checks. This is more of a lightweight approach to learning than offered by traditional learning management systems. 

And when learning is integrated from the very start – rather than a conversation you have later in the employee journey – you can actually use onboarding to prepare your team for future challenges and future-proof against talent gaps.

Remote/Hybrid Work Experience: Connecting and Integrating Culture

There’s no question that the hybrid and remote work boom has added a layer of complexity to onboarding. Just look at the data from Enboarder’s global employee onboarding survey:

Source: The State of Employee Onboarding Report

Remote new hires are nearly 50% more likely to say culture was demonstrated poorly or not at all during onboarding compared to their peers on-site. They’re almost 2x as likely to say the onboarding software or app they used was not helpful.

2025 will be about finding ways to integrate new employees into your company culture, even from a distance. Use technology to facilitate mentorships, buddy programs, and cross-department introductions. Automation and AI can help you maintain consistency in these efforts and reduce your administrative workload.

Personalization and Human Connection: More Than Just a Name

Is it possible to treat every new hire’s onboarding journey uniquely and do it at scale? With advances in AI and automation, we say, “heck yes!” 

When we asked employees about the most beneficial features that make onboarding technology helpful, here were the top 3:

1. Connection to Information
2. Connections to Colleagues and Peers
3. Connection to Managers

Digital tools that facilitate personal connections – such as video welcome messages from team leaders, virtual coffee chats, or interactive Q&A sessions with peers – can make all the difference in a distributed work environment.

Next Steps: Make Onboarding a Strategic Priority

Because of these macro trends around distributed work and the talent shortage, onboarding is increasingly being seen as a strategic business driver. In fact, Lighthouse Research & Advisory found onboarding was the top priority for HR teams over the next year.

By leaning into the macro trends reshaping the workforce, you can use onboarding as a way to drive performance and engagement across your organization – and do it at scale, efficiently.

We’d love to help you make onboarding your strategic advantage in 2025. Book a demo today!