Onboarding statistics, definitions, HR's role, the four-stage journey, and how to measure whether it worked.
Conducted by Jane Fan and Tammy Rainey
Before the frameworks, the statistics. Jane Fan and Tammy Rainey open the session with the hard evidence for why onboarding is load-bearing, not ceremonial. The numbers fall into three groups: what happens when onboarding fails, what new hires gain when it goes well, and what the company gains when the program is built with intention.
The deck is titled First Impressions, Lasting Impact: A Crowdsourced Guide to Great Onboarding, and the byline reads "Conducted by Jane Fan and Tammy Rainey." That word choice is deliberate. This session is crowdsourced — the frameworks come from the front of the room, but the expertise comes from the baHRC community itself. Jane and Tammy set the tempo and keep everyone in time. The audience plays the music.
Jane Fan walks through the three outcomes a strong onboarding program measurably produces. None of them are soft. All of them have percentages attached.
Reinforce the decision. A structured onboarding program gives new hires clarity and direction, and raises their engagement from day one. The first week is when a new hire either confirms or second-guesses their choice — and the program gets to decide which.
Retention lift. A great onboarding process can improve retention by 82%. Organizations that build team-building directly into onboarding see 50% higher retention than those that treat socialization as an afterthought.
Productivity gain. Organizations with strong onboarding boost productivity by more than 70%. The investment isn't time lost to ramp-up — it's time bought back from the other side.
Source: hibob.com/blog/onboarding-statistics/
One of the session's first definitional moves: orientation and onboarding are not synonyms. Jane Fan draws the line cleanly.
Onboarding integrates the new hire into their team, the company culture, the organization's mission, vision, and values, and their specific role. It's multi-dimensional by design. No single conversation or document covers it.
Onboarding starts the moment an offer is accepted — not on day one. And it lasts three months to a year, depending on the role's complexity. Programs that end at thirty days are orientation programs dressed up as onboarding programs.
This is the session's most distinctive framing and its most quotable editorial moment. Tammy Rainey and Jane Fan split HR's onboarding role into two archetypes. Every practitioner recognizes both. Most of us have lived both in the same week.
Making the impossible look effortless.
HR sets the tempo and everyone else follows.
The Cat Herder is reactive — fighting entropy one task at a time. The Conductor is architectural — building a system that keeps itself in time. Most HR teams oscillate between the two. The goal of a good onboarding program is to move the balance toward the Conductor role.
Here the session pivots from concept to structure. The onboarding experience is broken into four stages, and the rest of the session walks through each one in turn.
From accepted offer to first day.
The welcome that sets the tone for everything after.
Foundation, relationships, first check-ins.
Momentum, review, and the handoff to ongoing performance.
As you read, think about:
Your best onboarding experience. Your worst. And that great idea you never got to implement.
These three questions are what the live room held open throughout the session. They're worth holding open as you read, too.
Pre-boarding is the runway between the signed offer and the first day. It's where the new hire is most uncertain — they've committed, but nothing is confirming the decision yet. Silence here is expensive. Well-run pre-boarding turns the waiting period into a reassurance.
Jane Fan splits day one into the necessary and the memorable. Both matter. Running one without the other is how organizations end up with day-one experiences that are either legally compliant and soul-crushing, or culturally warm and administratively broken.
Get the paperwork out of the way, fast.
Day 1 goal: Leave them feeling welcomed, informed, and proud to be here.
Week one is when the new hire stops being a guest and starts being a colleague. The session structures it in three passes: setting the foundation, meeting the team, and checking in.
Week 1 goal: Leave Friday feeling like they belong and can't wait to make a difference.
The First 90 Days segment is where many programs quietly stop, leaving new hires between the formal onboarding experience and the annual performance cycle. Tammy Rainey argues for three distinct checkpoints.
The 75-day checkpoint is the one most programs skip, and it's the one that prevents surprises at 90. If something is off, 75 is early enough to fix it. Discovering it at 90 usually means discovering it at 180.
An onboarding program without measurement is a tradition, not a system. Tammy Rainey and Jane Fan name four metrics that separate the two.
At this point in the session, Jane Fan and Tammy Rainey set the frameworks aside and show the room what the work actually produces. It's a LinkedIn message Jane received from a colleague she helped onboard — unprompted, unannounced, and unambiguous.
The statistics and the four-stage journey exist to make this kind of message more likely. That's what the work is actually for.
Before handing the room back to the community for the crowdsourced segment, Jane Fan and Tammy Rainey compress the journey into a single view. If you remember nothing else from the session, this is the frame to hold.
The session closes with the community business that every baHRC gathering ends on — what's on the calendar, what's being organized, and how members stay connected between sessions. The session was a working conversation for this community. Follow baHRC on LinkedIn to catch the next one.