A new employee’s first week is a whirlwind of faces, information, and new systems. But for the IT department, it’s often a frantic, repetitive scramble. Did they get the right laptop? Does their Salesforce login work? Why can’t they connect to the printer?
This chaotic process, often dismissed as “just part of starting a new job,” carries a steep and often invisible price tag. A bad IT onboarding experience doesn’t just frustrate new hires; it actively drains money and productivity from your business from day one.
Let’s break down the shocking, real-world costs of inefficient IT onboarding and lay out a clear, documentation-driven strategy to fix it for good.
The Hidden Costs Draining Your Budget
When you think of onboarding costs, you probably think of recruitment fees and salary. But the IT-related costs, while harder to track, are just as significant.
1. Lost Productivity (The New Hire & Their Team)
Every hour a new employee spends waiting for a password reset, a software license, or instructions on how to access a shared drive is an hour you are paying them to do nothing. This delay has a ripple effect. Their manager can’t delegate tasks, and team members have to pause their own work to help them with basic setup issues.
2. Wasted IT & Helpdesk Time
How much of your helpdesk’s day is spent on repetitive onboarding tickets? Manually setting up accounts, answering the same questions over and over, and troubleshooting predictable first-week issues is a massive time sink. This is time your skilled IT professionals could be spending on strategic projects, infrastructure improvements, or high-priority incidents.
3. Increased Security Risks
A rushed, inconsistent onboarding process is a gateway for security breaches. When steps are missed, new employees might be given overly broad access permissions, or former employee accounts might not be properly decommissioned. A lack of clear documentation on security policies from day one leaves your entire organization vulnerable.
How to Calculate Your Onboarding Cost
Want to see the financial impact for yourself? Try this simple formula:
(Avg. Hourly IT Cost × Hours Spent per New Hire) + (Avg. Hourly New Hire Cost × Hours of Downtime) = Cost per Onboarding
Let’s say an IT staff member ($40/hr) spends 5 hours on manual setup, and the new employee ($35/hr) loses 6 hours of productivity in their first week due to IT issues.
($40 × 5) + ($35 × 6) = $200 + $210 = $410
That’s $410 of pure waste for one employee. If you hire 50 people a year, you’re burning over $20,000 annually on a problem that is entirely solvable.
How to Fix It: A Documentation-Driven Strategy
The antidote to onboarding chaos is a robust, centralized knowledge base. By documenting your processes and empowering users to self-serve, you can reclaim that lost time and money.
Step 1: Standardize with a Checklist The first step is to create a master IT onboarding checklist. This ensures no step is ever missed, from pre-arrival account creation to first-week follow-up. It makes the process repeatable, auditable, and efficient. (You can grab a ready-to-use checklist in our post, 10 Free IT Documentation Templates).
Step 2: Build a “First Week” Knowledge Base Collection Create a dedicated section in your knowledge base for new hires. This should include simple, user-friendly guides on the most common first-week questions:
- How to set up your email signature
- How to connect to the office Wi-Fi and printers
- How to use the company VPN
- An overview of key software and who to contact for access
Step 3: Automate the Generic Stuff Here’s the secret weapon: you shouldn’t be writing most of those guides yourself. The instructions for how to use Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Slack are the same for every company. Instead of wasting time writing and constantly updating this documentation, a managed knowledge base can provide it for you.
A platform like Kandbe comes pre-loaded with a library of hundreds of guides for common business software—all professionally written and, crucially, kept up-to-date automatically. When a new hire asks, “How do I create a filter in Gmail?”, you can direct them to a perfect guide you didn’t have to lift a finger to create.
By combining a standardized internal checklist with an automated library of external software guides, you can transform your IT onboarding from a costly, manual process into a streamlined, professional experience that makes new hires feel empowered and productive from the very first hour.
Stop wasting money on bad onboarding.
See how Kandbe’s managed knowledge base can streamline your onboarding process and give your new hires the self-service tools they need to succeed.