An employee’s first impressions of an organisation can have a significant impact on job satisfaction and their integration.  

An effective induction (or "onboarding") ensures that a new starter is properly welcomed to the organisation, helps them to settle in and makes sure they have the information they need to perform effectively. An effective induction will also contribute to overall employee experience and longer-term engagement.  It will also reduce the risk that the new employee does not settle in well, resulting in early attrition and its associated costs.  

A supportive, comprehensive and engaging induction will include information on: 

  • The organisation: including mission, values, strategy and objectives, as well as history and culture. Policies, procedures and administration.  
  • The team and the people: including manager, immediate team, colleagues across the organisation, key stakeholders or customers.  
  • The role and responsibilities: including performance expectations, objectives, key performance indicators and ways of working.  

This guide offers advice on running effective inductions with links to practical tools to help implement the advice. 

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Practical tools to support
effective induction

CIPD members can download a range of tools to help them develop effective induction processes

Access the tools
  • Factsheet

    Recruitment: An introduction

    Facts on the recruitment and resourcing process; from defining the role to making the appointment

    For Members
  • Data

    Hard-to-fill vacancies

    Explore hard-to-fill vacancy trends by industry with data analysis from the CIPD's Labour Market Outlook report. CIPD members can also download the data for use in your internal organisational benchmarking, discussions, and business cases.

  • Data

    Workforce diversity - Sex

    Compare your organisation's workforce breakdown by sex against UK benchmarks, using the CIPD's expert analyses of the UK Annual Population Survey. CIPD members can also download the datasets to use in your internal presentations, discussions, and business cases.

    • All guides