For candidates →Pre-boarding tasks & welcome
The 4-to-12-week period between offer-acceptance and start. Structured task sequence that builds engagement, surfaces friction early, and reduces no-show rate (which can run 8–12% in some sectors).
Solutions · Retain
Your offer-acceptance is up. Your 24-month retention isn’t.
Looking at 18,000 early-career hires across our deployment cohorts, the strongest predictor of whether someone is still in the role at 24 months isn’t starting salary, employer brand or even line-manager quality. It’s a defined, deliberate first-90-days plan. Most early-careers onboarding is a checklist, an HR induction and “we’ll catch up at month three”. Onboarding is the solution that fixes the highest-leverage retention point you’re probably not investing in.
The 90-day evidence
First 90 days predicts retention more reliably than salary.
We studied 18,000 early-careers hires across financial services, professional services, engineering, retail and tech. The 24-month retention difference between hires with the strongest first-90-days experiences and hires with the weakest is 21 percentage points. The next-strongest predictor is starting salary, at 8 percentage points; line-manager quality is third, at 6 percentage points.
In other words: a defined, deliberate 90-day onboarding programme moves retention more than the things most TA leaders are tracked on. And it’s the cheapest of the three to fix.
Hires studied
18,000
Early-careers hires across financial services, professional services, engineering, retail and tech, 2022–2025.
Retention difference
21pp
24-month retention gap between best-decile and worst-decile first-90-days experiences.
Microsoft uplift
+21pp
24-month retention uplift across three Microsoft UK apprentice intakes after onboarding redesign.
Cost per retained hire
£12–18k
Avoided replacement cost per retained hire, in the sectors we operate in.
If you don't fix this
A graduate hired in September who leaves in March cost you everything, twice.
When an early-careers hire leaves in their first six months, the sunk cost is roughly 100% of the assessment, interview, onboarding and team-time spend, plus another 60% of that figure in lost productivity, plus the cost of being back in market with the same problem. The total — for sectors where graduate cost-per-hire is in the £20k range — is roughly £35k per first-six-months attrition. Most TA dashboards don’t surface this; most line managers absorb it as “the cost of doing business”.
Onboarding is the highest-leverage retention investment you’re probably not making.
Onboarding is the solution that moves the metric. We design first-90-days programmes specifically for early-careers cohorts — pre-boarding tasks, structured welcome journey, manager calibration, 30/60/90 pulse measurement, hand-off to programme management. The defining decision is that we treat onboarding as a programme, not an HR induction event. It runs on TalentHub, integrates with the Apprenticeship Recruitment and Graduate & Intern Recruitment solutions where relevant, and reports retention back into the selection model for next cohort calibration.
How we deliver this
Six things that make a first-90-days programme work.
Designed against the operational outcome (24-month retention) rather than the input (HR-induction completion). The defaults below are the starting point; sector practitioners adjust per cohort and per role family.
Featured · Microsoft UK
Case study · Apprentice scheme onboarding redesign
Microsoft: +21pp retention, three intakes.
Microsoft’s UK technical apprentice scheme redesigned its onboarding from a checklist-style induction to a structured 90-day programme on TalentHub in 2023. Across three subsequent intake cycles, 24-month retention rose 21 percentage points. The pulse-survey programme also surfaced two early-warning indicators that allowed mid-cohort intervention — one of which would otherwise have lost an apprentice cohort to a single line-management issue that wasn’t visible to HR.
+21pp
Retention 24mo
3
Intake cycles
94%
EPA pass-rate
What this connects to
Onboarding is where selection meets retention.
Onboarding sits at the handoff between hire and programme. Upstream is the rest of the early-careers funnel — Apprenticeship Recruitment, Graduate & Intern Recruitment. Downstream is programme management, performance management, and the chartership routes for sectors where those matter. The most powerful loopback is into the Assessment Platform: where retention is differentiated by selection signal, we adjust the model for next cohort.
Most clients add Onboarding to an existing apprentice or graduate engagement after the first cohort completes. Some deploy it stand-alone — particularly clients who don’t use TTP for selection but want to fix the retention number that’s costing them.
Platform
TalentHub
Programme-management hub. Welcome journey, pulse, manager calibration in one place.
Upstream
Graduate & Apprentice
Where the cohort comes from. Onboarding picks up at offer-acceptance.
Loopback
Assessment Platform
Retention outcomes feed back into selection-model calibration for next cohort.
Onboarding programmes at
Microsoft
Schneider Electric
FTSE 100 bank
John Lewis
PwC
DHL
National Grid
Channel 4
Talk to the onboarding team
Got a retention number that’s drifting?
Most clients start with a 60-minute audit: we plug your last three cohorts’ first-90-days programme into our retention model, walk through where the gaps are, and tell you which interventions would move 24-month retention most. Walk away with a numbered list and a cost-per-retained-hire calculation for your specific cohorts.