Creating Your Employee Onboarding Video

An employee onboarding video is less of a formal document and more of a warm, engaging welcome to your company. Think of it as your first handshake. It’s a way to introduce new hires to your company’s culture, mission, and the must-knows for their first day, all without drowning them in paperwork. It’s about replacing a dull, administrative task with a dynamic and memorable first impression, so every new team member feels confident from the get-go.

First impressions are everything, and in the workplace, that impression starts forming long before a new hire’s first day. A compelling video is no longer just a ‘nice-to-have’, it’s become a fundamental piece of any winning onboarding strategy, especially as work environments grow more flexible and distributed.

You can think of a well-crafted employee onboarding video as your company’s ambassador. It’s tasked with delivering a perfectly consistent, high-quality message about your culture, mission, and values. This message reaches every single new hire, whether they’re sitting in the main office or joining from halfway across the world.

The Power of Consistency and Connection

One of the biggest wins with an onboarding video is its ability to create a shared, unified experience. It smooths out the natural variations that happen with in-person sessions, which can easily differ based on who’s presenting, what day it is, or even the questions that pop up. This consistency ensures everyone starts with the same foundational knowledge, a crucial step in building a stable and cohesive company culture.

But beyond just consistency, video works on an emotional level that text simply can’t match. It’s your chance to:

Showcase your culture with real footage of team events, office life, and candid moments.
Feature your leadership with a personal welcome message that feels far more authentic than a templated email.
Tell your company’s story in a compelling way that truly inspires and excites new team members.

This human touch is what elevates a standard orientation into a genuinely memorable welcome.

From Information Overload to Perfect Retention

Let’s be honest: traditional onboarding can be a firehose of information. New hires are often swamped with handbooks, policy documents, and a mountain of administrative tasks. Video is the perfect tool to cut right through that noise.

The human brain processes visual information a staggering 60,000 times faster than plain text. This means complex ideas, from your company’s origin story to a tricky software walkthrough, become much easier to digest and remember when presented in a video.

This approach just clicks with how people learn today. We’re all used to consuming information through dynamic, visual media. By meeting new hires where they are, you greatly improve information retention and keep them engaged from their very first interaction. As technology evolves, the role of AI in HR continues to grow, making digital tools like video even more essential to the employee experience.

This is where it gets interesting, check out the comparison:

Video Onboarding vs Traditional: Game-Changing Differences

Attribute	Video Onboarding	Traditional Onboarding
Consistency	Delivers a standardized, high-quality message to every new hire, every time.	Varies by presenter, location, and day, leading to inconsistent experiences.
Engagement	Uses visuals, music, and storytelling to create an engaging, memorable experience.	Relies on lectures and paperwork, which can often be dry and overwhelming.
Retention	Visual information is processed faster, leading to significantly higher knowledge retention.	Information overload from text-heavy documents often results in poor retention.
Scalability	Easily distributed to any number of hires, regardless of their location.	Time-consuming and resource-intensive to scale, especially for remote teams.
Accessibility	Available on-demand, with options for subtitles, making it accessible to all.	Scheduled at fixed times, which may not suit everyone’s learning style or needs.
Cost-Effectiveness	A one-time investment that can be used repeatedly, reducing long-term costs.	Incurs ongoing costs for trainers, materials, and venue space.

The takeaway here is that video onboarding isn’t just a modern alternative; it’s a strategic upgrade that offers tangible benefits in efficiency, impact, and inclusivity.

Building Onboarding That Grows With Your Team

As your company grows, manually onboarding every single new person becomes a huge logistical headache. An onboarding video is an asset that scales right alongside you, effortlessly. It becomes the reliable foundation of your process, which frees up your HR team to focus on what they do best: high-touch, personalized interactions.

This scalability naturally fosters inclusivity. A video with clear audio and subtitles ensures that your core information is accessible to everyone, no matter their location, learning style, or language proficiency.

Ultimately, a strong onboarding video is a critical piece of your larger internal communications puzzle. For more ideas on this, check out our guide on the 10 reasons to use video in your internal communications strategy. When you embrace video, you’re not just updating a process; you’re making a direct investment in the long-term success and integration of your new hires.

Mapping Out Your Video Content for Maximum Impact

A truly great employee onboarding video feels authentic and effortless, but that’s the result of meticulous planning, not winging it. This pre-production phase is where you lay the groundwork for a video that actually connects with new hires.

It all boils down to defining your goals. Forget just ticking boxes on a checklist; think about the experience you want to create. Get your team together and hash out the answers to a few key questions:

What should a new hire know? This is the practical stuff: who are the key people, what are the essential tools, and what does the first week look like?
How should a new hire feel? You’re aiming for emotions like excitement, a sense of belonging, and confidence. You want them to feel like they made the absolute right choice joining your team.
What should a new hire do? Be crystal clear on the immediate next steps. Should they log into a system, fill out a specific form, or start thinking about their first team meeting?

Getting clear on these three things first gives you a North Star, ensuring every second of your video serves a real purpose.

Creating a Narrative That Leaves a Mark

The most effective onboarding videos don’t just list facts; they tell a story. Your goal is to build a narrative that feels human and engaging, not like someone reading a corporate memo out loud. Think about a logical flow that walks the new hire through their first taste of your company.

A simple, effective flow could look something like this:

A Heartfelt Welcome: Kick things off with a warm, genuine message from the CEO or their direct team lead. It immediately sets a welcoming tone.
The Company Story & Mission: Briefly touch on where the company came from, but more importantly, where it’s going. Show them how their role fits into that bigger picture.
A Glimpse into the Culture: This is where you show, not just tell. Use quick cuts of team events, people collaborating, and candid moments to give a real feel for what makes your company tick.
The “Who’s Who” Introduction: Introduce key departments or team members they’ll be working with. Putting faces to names makes a big organization feel a lot less intimidating.
First-Week Essentials: Cover the must-knows: what to expect on day one, how to get their tech set up, and who to ping for help.
A Call to Action & Excitement: End on a high note. Reiterate how excited you are to have them and tell them the very next thing they should do.

To really nail the structure and make sure the information sticks, it’s smart to incorporate some instructional design best practices. This helps you organize everything in a way that’s easy for new folks to absorb and remember.

Scripting for a Conversational Tone

Once you’ve got your content mapped out, it’s time to write the script. The single biggest mistake I see people make here is writing something that sounds formal and robotic. You want this to feel like a chat with a friendly colleague, not a corporate broadcast.

A few quick tips for scripting:

Write like you talk. Use simple, direct language. Seriously, read your lines out loud as you write. If a sentence feels clunky or unnatural to say, it’s going to sound ten times worse on camera.
Use contractions. Words like “you’re,” “we’ll,” and “it’s” are your friends. They instantly make the script feel more natural and less stiff.
Tell stories, not just facts. Instead of saying, “We value collaboration,” tell a quick, 15-second story about a recent team project that crushed it. It’s so much more powerful.

Starting with a solid script and a clear plan makes the entire production process smoother and far more effective. In fact, many teams find that using pre-designed employee onboarding video templates gives them a great head start on structuring both their content and visuals. They provide a framework you can build on, so you’re not starting from a blank page.

Bringing Your Onboarding Video to Life with Wideo

Okay, this is where the magic happens. You’ve done the hard work of planning and scripting, and now it’s time to turn those ideas into a polished employee onboarding video. The best part? You don’t need a film degree or a tangled mess of complex editing software to create something that looks amazing.

Tools like Wideo are designed specifically for teams like yours, putting powerful, intuitive creation tools right at your fingertips. Let’s walk through exactly how you can take your script and transform it into a finished video that gets new hires genuinely excited to start their journey with your company.

Choosing Your Starting Point

Your first move inside Wideo is deciding how you want to begin. The good news is you’re not forced to stare at a blank screen unless you really want to. You’ve got a couple of great options, depending on how you like to work.

Start with a Template: This is usually the fastest and smartest route. Wideo has a whole library of templates designed for corporate and HR use cases. The structure, animations, and scene changes are already there, so your main job is to customize it and make it your own.
Begin with a Blank Canvas: Feeling adventurous? If you have a super specific vision or just enjoy the creative process, you can start from scratch. This gives you total control over every single element from the ground up.

For most teams, especially if this is your first onboarding video, I’d point you toward a template. It gives you a proven framework to build on, which saves a ton of time and makes sure you don’t overlook important structural pieces.

Making Your Brand the Star of the Show

An onboarding video can’t feel generic; it needs to feel like your company. Branding is what turns a standard video into a personal welcome, and Wideo makes this part incredibly simple.

Once you’ve picked a template, start making it yours. Upload your company logo and pop it in a corner of the screen for consistency. Then, jump into the color settings. You can replace the template’s default colors with your brand’s exact primary and secondary hex codes. It’s a small change that makes a huge impact on the video’s look and feel.

Now for the secret sauce: replace those default fonts with your brand typeface. It’s the difference between looking like everyone else and looking like the professional company you are.

The Final Touches That Make All the Difference

Looks are only half the battle. What your new hire hears and reads is what makes your key messages stick.

The Perfect Voiceover

You have the script, but the delivery is everything. Wideo gives you choices. You can record your voiceover directly inside the editor, which is perfect for an authentic, in-the-moment feel. Just hit record, read your script, and the audio drops right onto your timeline.

If you have a professionally recorded audio file, you can upload that instead. This flexibility lets you pick the best option based on your resources and desired level of polish.

Setting the Mood with Music

Never underestimate the power of background music. It sets the entire emotional tone. A friendly, upbeat track can make the content feel exciting, while a more thoughtful tune can add a sense of sincerity and importance. Take a minute to browse Wideo’s library of royalty-free music to find a track that matches your company’s vibe.

Highlighting Key Information

Use text on the screen to back up what the narrator is saying. This is super helpful for:

Showing names and titles when you introduce people.
Calling out important dates or deadlines.
Summarizing the key takeaways from a section.

Just keep the text short and sweet. The goal is to support the voiceover, not make your new hire read a novel on screen.

Remember, the tools available today make it easier than ever to create a truly special welcome. You can even explore creating personalized video messages that greet each new hire by name. By pulling all these techniques together, you’ll craft an onboarding video that’s not just professional but genuinely memorable.

The Day After: What Your New Hires Really Think

Your video metrics tell you if people watched, but feedback from new hires tells you if it actually worked. This human element is absolutely critical for making improvements that matter. You don’t need to overcomplicate it; a simple, direct approach often works best.

Try setting up a short, automated survey that goes out a week or two after a new hire watches the video. Ask targeted, open-ended questions like:

On a scale of 1-5, how helpful was the onboarding video in making you feel welcome?
What was the most valuable piece of information you learned?
Was there anything in the video that felt unclear or confusing?
Is there anything you wish we had included?

The answers you get here are pure gold. They help you pinpoint specific areas for a refresh, whether that means updating a section on company values or adding a more detailed walkthrough of a key software tool. This feedback loop is what turns a good onboarding asset into a great one. Our guide on creating an engaging employee training video has even more tips on structuring content that really connects with people.

The best part? You don’t need to start from scratch or become a video expert overnight. Building that perfect onboarding experience doesn’t have to be complicated. Wideo makes it simple to create professional employee onboarding videos that can be automatically personalized and delivered to each new hire. No technical skills needed, just results that make every team member feel welcome from day one.