You never got a second chance for a first impression. That’s especially true when it comes to onboarding new employees.
Let’s assume you have done everything right during the hiring process (because that’s a challenge in itself), and your new hires actually show up on their first day (because 14% just don’t after finding out information about bad employee experiences at the company, but who can blame them?). This is, however, not where you get all ahead of yourself. Why? 44% of employees say they have had regrets or second thoughts about accepting their job offer within the first week.
The first week and, naturally, month, 44 days to be exact according to BambooHR, can make or break new hires’ decision to stay—or leave. From meeting new colleagues and familiarizing themselves with new tools to learning the ins and outs of their role and acclimatizing to the new workplace culture, new employees have their plate full as they start their journey with a new company.
Effective onboarding programs can make all the difference.
Why Do New Hires Leave So Fast?
If your workplace feels more like a revolving door, with new faces showing up every other week only to disappear just as quickly, that is definitely not a good sign.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics offers some of the most comprehensive looks into hiring data. For example, in March 2025, there were 5.4 million people hired into new roles. But there is another large number to pay attention to here: 3.3 million people. That’s how many individuals quit jobs during that same time period.
Although the data breaks down differently when you parse it by industry and employer, broadly speaking, that’s roughly a 2-to-3 ratio of quits to hires. So for every 3 people that are starting new jobs, 2 people are quitting. Why are so many people coming in and going at such a fast rate? Surveys vary, but they land on three top concerns:
1. Lack of internal opportunity and mobility
Beyond today’s immediate priorities like compensation, work-life balance, flexible work arrangements, and job security, a 2025 LinkedIn survey found opportunities for career growth within the company, at 33%, is one of the top priorities candidates want when considering a new job. This aligns with findings from a 2018 LinkedIn survey that found the top reason people were quitting at that time was that they did not see a future path for growth in their organization. Even new hires quit early if they aren’t given clear career pathways.
Of course, the economy and priorities have changed due to the pandemic, which is why “greater pay or opportunities” exceed all other reasons for wanting to quit by a large margin, according to a McKinsey study. Still, “better career opportunities” came in second place in that same study, revealing that it’s still a major factor for workers.
2. Lack of connection
Partly as a result of the increasing trend toward remote work, more people than ever are feeling lonely and disconnected from their colleagues. In 2024, the American Psychological Association (APA) found that 45% of workers aged 18–25 said they feel lonely when they are working. This is particularly concerning as Gen Z is expected to make up 27% of the global workforce by year-end. If new employees aren’t connected to their teams and to senior-level leaders early, they are far less likely to be engaged during the onboarding and far more likely to quit.
3. Lack of structure
Onboarding programs that are structured, intentional, and thoughtfully designed to maximize new hires’ experience can significantly reduce turnover. An Aberdeen Group study found that companies with a formal and standardized onboarding process experienced 50% better new hire retention compared to companies without formalized onboarding. This makes a lot of sense as new hires’ top frustrations include a lack of:
- #1 clear points of contact (go-to person) for questions (65%),
- #2 training on company products and/or services (62%)
- #3 access to essential tools (58%)
Imagine starting a new job full of energy and excitement, only to end up confused, lost, and unsupported from day one. It all but guarantees your best people won’t stick around.
Why Mentoring Is Essential for New Employee Onboarding
When you embed mentoring into the employee onboarding process, you solve the three problems above—and many more.
Let’s look at some numbers from BambooHR:
- 93% of new hires want to shadow a colleague.
- 87% of new hires hope to make a friend at work.
- 86% of new hires appreciate support from an onboarding buddy.
Mentoring programs can take many forms, including job shadowing and buddy systems. If we look closely, both practices involve pairing two employees (or more) for mutual support, knowledge sharing, and social connection. This pairing not only helps the new hires acclimate faster to their role and the company culture, but also reduces feelings of isolation and uncertainty.
Without mentoring, employee onboarding can feel a bit stale. It might just look like a checklist of training videos to watch, online courses to complete, or documents to fill out—all of which often lack the engagement and depth needed to truly integrate new hires into their new team and workplace.
With mentoring, on the other hand, new hires get to build confidence and meaningful relationships with a mentor they shadow, a buddy they regularly check in with, and a colleague who hopefully becomes a friend along the journey. This way, a sense of belonging is formed, which, as a result, boosts engagement, retention, and long-term success.
✨ Gen Zers joining your team soon? Check out how to onboard Gen Z here!
How to Build a Mentoring Program for Effective Onboarding Process
So, where do you even begin to introduce mentoring to employee onboarding processes?
Instead of making mentoring “a part” of onboarding, we recommend designing onboarding “around” mentoring. This means putting human connection and learning at the heart of every step from day one (or even before).
1. Kick off with a match
Before their first day, pair each new employee with a dedicated mentor. While one-on-one mentoring is ideal, group mentoring is equally acceptable where large cohorts commence together. If you are a small business of 10 employees, manually pairing new joiners with current staff would, by all means, suffice.
However, it’s not uncommon for larger organizations to welcome and onboard hundreds—or even thousands—of new hires on the same day (or within the same week), like Deloitte welcomed 1,700 graduates and apprentices across 16 locations in the UK last year alone*. In this case, manual matching process at scale can become a sort of waking nightmare.
And this is where mentoring software like MentorcliQ comes in. With our SMART matching engine built on the Nobel Prize-winning Gale-Shapley algorithm, mentors and mentees are matched based on scores, rules, and other criteria you wish to configure. For onboarding, this might look like:
- Pairing a new employee with a mentor from the same department
- Assigning one mentor to a cohort within the same specialty or function
- Matching two new employees based on location or prior experience in a similar industry
The possibilities are endless!
Don’t forget to share mentor and mentee profiles ahead of time so they can find common ground and set mentoring in motion from day one with clarity and purpose.
2. Structure milestones as mentoring touchpoints
It makes sense for administrative tasks, like completing employment contracts, setting up payroll, and registering your license plate for office car park access, can easily completed with a checklist since there is no ongoing dialog required.
On the other hand, deeper onboarding milestones, like integrating into a new team, setting goals, and getting up to speed on processes, are relational, intentional, and context-driven. And that is precisely why mentoring can serve as a space for questions, feedback, and course correction as needed.
When you tie onboarding milestones with mentoring touchpoints, you set the tone not only for the entire mentoring relationship but also for the employee experience itself, for example:
- Week 1: Focus on helping the new hire understand team dynamics, company values, and overall company culture. This is also a great time for informal chats to break the ice and start building rapport.
- Week 2: Discuss short- and long-term goals, both personal and professional. Clarify how their role contributes to the team and company objectives. This session should feel like a collaborative planning moment, not just a directive.
- Week 3: Walk through the tools, systems, and processes the new employee will be using. Highlight any small wins they have had so far and answer lingering questions. This helps boost confidence and encourages early engagement.
This, again, highlights how important it is for onboarding to be structured. You can’t just pair up mentors and mentees and expect them to wing it and figure out how to build a successful mentoring relationship on their own.
3. Embed shadowing, ERG, and employee community
Encourage new employees to shadow their mentor during meetings, calls, or project work. This gives them a feel for how team members interact and collaborate, how decisions are made, and how their role fits into the bigger picture. It’s also an organic way to pick up on communication styles, team norms, and unwritten rules and etiquette that no handbook can teach.
Once new employees have observed for a while, try reverse shadowing so the mentee can walk the mentor through something they have learned or started working on. This gives mentors a clearer view of how well onboarding is landing and where there may be gaps.
Beyond one-on-one mentoring, it’s just as important, if not more so, to help new employees feel like they belong at work from early on. A good place to start is Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), which can help new hires feel supported, seen, heard, and included well beyond the immediate team they are joining.
4. Check in regularly
Just like any other relationship, what makes a successful mentoring relationship is consistency.
Encourage mentors to carve out 5-10 minutes each day for a quick “How are things?” It can be over a coffee, a quick call, or even a Slack message. These check-ins can prevent small issues from snowballing into something catastrophic and give new hires the confidence to ask questions in real time. Note that the cadence will naturally taper off as new hires become more settled in their role.
To keep chats fresh, insightful, and awkward moments at bay, prompts can come in pretty handy:
- What is one thing you wish you had known yesterday?
- Tell me about a moment that surprised you this week.
- If you could change one part of your onboarding so far, what would it be?
These prompts steer the conversation beyond task status and into emotional and cultural learning.
For remote or distributed teams, not every check-in needs to be live. A dedicated Slack channel or a thread for everyone to share daily highlights, hurdles, and wins (or even dog photos from time to time, why not?!) can go a long, long way.
5. Celebrate milestones together
As the saying goes, success uncelebrated is success unappreciated. When you, as mentors, take the time to acknowledge progress and celebrate achievements, no matter big or small, you motivate and strengthen a sense of belonging in your mentees.
For new hires especially, recognition can offer reassurance that they are on the right track and help ease the anxiety that often comes with entering and navigating new territories.
6. Get feedback and act on it
After a certain period of time that mentors and mentees agree on, say three months, hold a feedback session to see what worked, what did not, and what could be improved. Get insights from both mentors and mentees, ideally in separate sessions so both parties feel comfortable speaking candidly.
More importantly, it’s one thing to collect feedback but another to actually act on it. We need to remind ourselves that when people make themselves heard, it takes courage to do so. If their feedback is not taken seriously, they may hesitate to speak up again because their experience tells them nothing will change. You know what this road leads to: a culture where voices go silent, trust eroded, and employee engagement plummeted. So make sure you close the loop and share what’s changing as a result.
Setting New Hires Up for Success
If your onboarding process feels a bit more or less like what Helly R. watches on her first day at Lumon Industries… it’s probably time for an upgrade. Expecting your new employees to miraculously thrive after watching that welcome video from the aughts is a stretch.
Employee onboarding should be intentional, personal, and actually helpful. Here are a few tips for your next steps.
- Build a trusted mentor pool: Have a list of mentors across your organization that spans departments and hierarchies. This helps ensure you match your new hire to the best mentor for their role. Your onboarding mentors should be on-call and ready to welcome the new employee to the team. If finding these mentors is a challenge, ask colleagues to nominate each other.
- Provide structure to the program: We cannot stress this enough: have a detailed structure with guidelines on expectations, communication, milestones, and an overarching onboarding goal. This helps guide the mentor so they are not blindly leading and setting too high an expectation for the new hire too early.
- Measure program success: Since the overall goal is to retain new hires and keep them engaged, you should spend time evaluating if the program is effective in reaching those goals and whether participants are satisfied. Tracking retention and satisfaction will help keep support for your program by demonstrating ROI as well as help you address any minor problems with participants before they evolve into major issues.
So, how do you want your employee onboarding process to look like? Connect with MentorcliQ and see for yourself how our #1 mentoring platform can help shape employee onboarding that makes every new hire feel seen, supported, and set up for success.
