Training Videos for Onboarding: How to Create Them Without a Production Budget
Training Videos for Onboarding: How to Create Them Without a Production Budget
Creating training videos for onboarding used to mean hiring a production crew, writing formal scripts, and spending thousands of dollars. Today, internal processes change too fast for that approach to work. By the time a high-production video is finished, the software interface it demonstrates has already been updated.
You need a way to create an employee training video quickly and cheaply. This guide shows you how to build a training video onboarding process using tools you probably already have, basic screen recording software, and practical workflows that don't require a film degree.
Why Do Most Employee Training Videos Fail?
Most employee training videos fail because they are too long, quickly become outdated, and lack searchable text. When a new hire is stuck on a specific task, they cannot easily skim a 45-minute video to find the exact 10-second clip they need.
Teams often try to solve onboarding by recording an entire hour-long Zoom orientation and dumping the file into a shared drive. This creates an illusion of documentation. The information is technically there, but the format makes it hostile to the user. New employees end up asking their manager how to do the task anyway because scrubbing through a massive video file takes too much time.
Effective video training requires modularity. Videos should cover one specific workflow, answer one specific question, and last no longer than three to five minutes.
What Equipment Do You Need for Training Videos?
To create effective training videos, you only need a quiet room, a decent USB microphone, and screen recording software. You do not need professional lighting, DSLR cameras, or expensive video editing suites to train your team.
Honestly, teams overthink the hardware. The most critical factor in an instructional video is audio clarity, not video resolution. If a new hire can hear you clearly and see your screen, the video will do its job.
Here is a practical breakdown of what you actually need versus what people think they need:
| Requirement | What People Think They Need | What You Actually Need |
|---|---|---|
| Microphone | $400 XLR studio microphone with a mixing board | $50-$100 USB microphone (like a Blue Yeti or Elgato Wave) or a good headset |
| Camera | 4K DSLR camera with a capture card | The built-in 1080p webcam on your laptop (or no camera at all) |
| Environment | Soundproofed studio with three-point lighting | A quiet room with a window facing you for natural light |
| Software | Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut | Loom, Zoom, or an automatic documentation tool like Glyde |
How Do You Create Training Videos for Onboarding?
You create training videos for onboarding by scoping the process to a single task, writing a rough outline, recording your screen while narrating the steps, and pairing the final video with written documentation.
1. Scope the process strictly
Pick one specific workflow. "How to use our CRM" is too broad and will result in a rambling 30-minute video. "How to log a new inbound lead in Salesforce" is the correct scope. If a process takes more than five minutes to explain, break it down into two separate videos.
2. Write a bulleted outline
Do not write a word-for-word script. Reading from a script usually sounds robotic and makes it difficult to navigate the screen naturally at the same time. Instead, write down the 5 to 7 major clicks or milestones in the process. Keep this list on a second monitor or a piece of paper on your desk to keep yourself on track.
3. Record and narrate
Start your screen recording software. State exactly what the video will cover in the first five seconds. Perform the workflow at a slightly slower pace than you normally would, explaining why you are clicking certain things, not just where you are clicking.
4. Accept mistakes
If you click the wrong tab or stumble over a word, just correct yourself and keep going. You are explaining a process to a coworker, not recording a Super Bowl commercial. Editing out minor mistakes takes time you don't have and provides zero additional value to the new hire watching it.
Screen Recording vs. High-Production Training Videos
Where traditional production fails, asynchronous screen recording works. High-production videos are treated as permanent assets, which makes teams hesitant to update them. Screen recordings are disposable by design.
When a UI changes or a step is added to a workflow, a screen-recorded video can be deleted and re-recorded by a manager in three minutes. A produced video requires coordinating with the original creator, finding the source files, recording new voiceovers, and rendering a new file.
The agility of screen recording is what actually allows a training video onboarding program to survive its first year. If the content is hard to update, it will simply rot.
How Do You Keep Training Video Onboarding Material Updated?
Keep training videos updated by recording short, modular clips and pairing them with written standard operating procedures (SOPs). When a process changes slightly, it is often easier to update a written step than to re-record an entire video.
This is the main drawback of video-only training: it is entirely opaque. You can't run a "find and replace" on an MP4 file.
To solve this, pair your videos with text. This is where tools like Glyde are useful. Glyde is a Chrome extension that records your screen while you work. Instead of just giving you a video file, it captures the DOM state, screenshots, and your clicks to automatically generate a step-by-step written SOP alongside the recording.
This hybrid approach works well for onboarding. The new hire gets the video to understand the broader context and hear your explanation of the nuances. But when they need to perform the task themselves a week later, they can just scroll through the generated text and screenshots without having to scrub through a timeline.
What Are the Best Tools for Employee Training Videos?
The software you choose dictates how much friction is involved in creating and sharing the content.
Loom Loom popularized asynchronous video at work. It is excellent for quickly recording your screen and your webcam simultaneously. It hosts the video automatically and gives you a link to share in Slack or drop into an onboarding document.
Zoom or Google Meet If you have zero budget, you can simply start a meeting with just yourself, share your screen, and hit record. The resulting file can be uploaded to an internal YouTube channel, Google Drive, or your company's learning management system.
Glyde If you want to generate written documentation at the same time you record your video, Glyde handles both. It watches your workflow and produces a formatted, step-by-step guide with contextual descriptions, which exports cleanly to Notion, Confluence, or PDF.
Scribe and Tango These are alternative documentation tools. They focus heavily on capturing screenshots and generating text captions. They are effective for written guides, though they lean away from the video/audio narration aspect of training.
Start with whatever tool is currently installed on your computer. The goal is capturing the knowledge before the new hire starts, not building a perfect media library.
Learn More About Employee Onboarding Documentation
For a broader look at getting new hires up to speed without relying entirely on shoulder-tapping, see our guide on the complete guide to employee onboarding documentation, including how to organize these videos into a cohesive day-one experience.
