Onboarding is an overlooked process that can make or break the productivity of a new hire. Not to mention employee engagement and long term career investment. So it’s time to stop treating it as a checkbox and see it as a very important first step in the new hire’s relationship to the organization.

Although onboarding appears to be purely transactional, it can be a strategic process that improves your bottom line. Get employees up to speed faster and contributing to your bottom line. We’ve already noted that only 30% of executives are satisfied with their onboarding process. Our paper, Onboarding: Speeding the Way to Productivity, outlines the process, explores current practices, and describes how it integrates into the hiring process.

Also Aberdeen’s Onboarding Benchmark Report: Technology Drivers Help Improve the New Hire Experience shows how paper based systems are more expensive and less effective than automated solutions.

But it’s not just your first impression that’s important. It’s also their first steps and what gets done once a new person starts the job that sets the path to higher productivity and retention.

Novations Group offers symptomatic findings in a survey of 2,000 HR executives that help explain why significant percentages of employers lose a staggering 25–50% of their new hires in the first year. Only 29% train hiring managers in onboarding. Their lack of retention, churn, and high cost of hire add unnecessary costs to the talent line simply because they lack automated tools and programs.

The first 90 to 100 days can make or break an employment relationship. And for HR executives, that same first impression time is an opportunity to shine. Mercer’s paper, Your first 100 days as Chief Human Resource Officer: Make a good first impression for lasting success, offers the insights needed to build a lasting foundation connecting HR goals and talent to those of the business.