The Best Free Employee Onboarding Software - November 2020
Everything you need to know about welcoming and onboarding new hires so you can increase retention, boost productivity, and save yourself a lot of time and money
Almost 30% of job seekers say they have left a position within their first 90 days. Therefore, it is important to properly engage your workforce at the very beginning of their journey with your company to ensure a high retention rate. Onboarding tools prepare them for success in their new roles, empower them to set high expectations for themselves, and even encourage them to stick around longer.
Employee turnover is costly, especially if those costs come immediately after new employee hiring expenses. Despite that, many small businesses and startups still might not be able to fit an onboarding platform in their budget. As such, we put together a list of the best free onboarding solutions, including free trials and free forever options. Our aim is to help small businesses empower new hires and create high-growth teams while also saving money and valuable time.
This guide outlines the best free employee onboarding systems, either those that have free trials or are actually free depending on your company size. You can also check out our landscape on the top employee onboarding solutions.
We spend hundreds of hours researching the best HR and recruiting software so you don’t have to. We never take money from vendors during our research phase and rely heavily on practitioners and experts to help us recommend the right software. Most of the vendors featured on our site have no commercial relationship with us, we want to feature the best software for our readers regardless. Learn more
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Top Free Employee Onboarding Software Platforms -- November 2020
We track thousands of HR Tech solutions. Here are the best free employee onboarding software as of November 2020.
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Zenefits offers a two week free trial of their Hiring & Onboarding software. Zenefits Hiring & Onboarding software is entirely online and mobile friendly, and allows employees to self-onboard, saving your organization lots of time. The solution follows the entire onboarding process from making the offer to managing employees once they’re fully assimilated. It connects automatically to the rest of their HR suit as well, making it ideal if you’re already a Zenefits customer.
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BambooHR offers a free trial of their HRMS platform, which includes onboarding. BambooHR's solution spans across the employee lifecycle as they also have recruiting and performance management in addition to the core HRMS functionality.
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Freshteam offers a 21-day free trial of their employee onboarding software solution. It allows you to put together and send an onboarding kit of documents, forms-to-fill, and handbooks to sign so it can all be taken care of before the first day. Whenever something is missed, the system sends out reminders. Some of the additional features Freshteam offers include task tracking, open API’s, and employee offboarding.
It is typically packaged as a part of their greater HR software package, of which they offer a free-forever plan called Sprout. Unfortunately, Sprout does not offer onboarding functionality at this time.
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Sentrifugo is a free open-source HRMS, which includes an onboarding module in its feature set. If your company is looking for a little bit of everything on top of onboarding, Sentrifugo is a great option. However, because it’s open source you have to save all of your data on your own servers. For a small to medium sized business, that shouldn’t end up being an issue.
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Employee engagement and performance management software company Leapsome offers a 24-day free trial of their product. It has a robust onboarding solution that lets you craft a step-by-step learning program and quiz your new hire on what they learned at each step.
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WebHR is free if you have 5 employees or less in your organization. Its base module includes onboarding tools, which are designed for new hire self-service. Employees can use any device to fill out paperwork, sign and upload documentation, choose benefits plans, and complete training modules.
Even if you need to upgrade, WebHR's options are pretty inexpensive, as little as $1/month per staff member. That makes it an ideal employee management system for small businesses.
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Buying HR Tools? Study Up First
Buying HR Tech is really hard, here's some tactical advice to help you save money and buy the right solution:
- Use these best practices to save time and money
- Make your purchase a success by getting internal buy-in
- Calculate ROI for your new purchase and get the budget you need
- Checkout the best vendors in other HR software categories
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Final Advice on Free Onboarding Software
When looking for a free software, you’re not going to be able to get everything on your list. Narrow down the list of features you want into “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves” and pursue the offering that fits as much of the must-haves as possible.
As your company grows, you’ll be able to branch out to the full version of these vendors, or even seek out a different one. We have an entire landscape dedicated to the best employee onboarding software when you’re ready to make the jump. In the meantime, use this page to find the best possible solution.
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