Employee Onboarding Surveys: What to ask and why?

What is an employee onboarding survey? ‍

Onboarding surveys, also known as new hire surveys, assess the experience of fresh employees and help managers in enhancing the onboarding and new-hire procedures.

Onboarding surveys are basically sets of questions. You ask these questions to new hires to see how they're feeling about the whole getting-hired process and starting work.

Make participation optional and allow skipped items. Explain who sees individual responses and summaries and what confidentiality is possible; small cohorts or identifying comments can reveal respondents. Give a separate HR support contact.

These questions cover everything from when they first heard about your company to what they thought during the interviews and how they're finding their first few months on the job.

These insights are helpful for HR folks and managers. They help them figure out if they're doing a good job at hiring and training new hires. They give them insights on feedback areas like:

• How satisfied they feel
• Their manager’s feedback
• The effectiveness of orientation processes
• Likelihood to stay

Why are onboarding surveys important? ‍

These initial experiences can shape new hires' overall perceptions of the company. Surveys can help identify support needs. If onboarding isn't smooth, it's a bad look. It can make new hires feel like they've made a mistake.

Onboarding question suggestions

Example timings—not a fixed schedule: early tools/access/support checks, role/training questions around day 30, and development questions around day 90 if those conversations have happened. Adjust to the role, as Acas advises for induction.

Keep labelled scales consistent across checks. For satisfaction: very dissatisfied, dissatisfied, neutral, satisfied, very satisfied. Match other scales to each question, use counts for people met, and offer “not yet applicable” for experiences they haven't had.

Optional open text: What tools, access or support are missing, and what change would help you do your work?

1. Overall, how well do you understand your role, including the responsibilities of your job?
2. How accurately was your role described to you during your interviews (i.e., Are you doing what you expected you’d be doing)?
3. How challenging would you say your current role is?
4. How interested are you in your current role?
5. How well do you know how to complete your work assignments?
6. How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the training that you have received for your new role?
7. Considering all of the people that you’ll be working with in your role, how many would you say that you’ve met?
8. How happy or unhappy are you with this company as a place to work?
9. How relevant have your role-based conversations been with your manager?
10. How relevant have your career-oriented conversations been with your manager?

Asking good questions like these gives us feedback to consider alongside KPIs such as:

• Tenure: monitor how long employees stay at the company
• Ramp time: monitor progress toward agreed role milestones
• Advocacy: monitor new hires' willingness to recommend you as a place to work

Assessing survey results‍

After you've surveyed your employees, it's time to check out the feedback. You can review the open text responses to spot trends and address the most important issues and opportunities.

Report response counts and compare the same questions at the same onboarding stage. Don't treat tiny groups as representative or share identifying comments. Ratings reflect perceived understanding or satisfaction, not competence; check role tasks and discuss progress separately.

CIPD advises listening and acting on feedback. Illustrative follow-up, not a tested result: laptop access is missing; the IT lead checks permissions by Friday and tells new hires what's fixed or still pending. Explain what can and cannot change.

It's vital to let your employees know you've heard their feedback and are making improvements.

Connecting your onboarding feedback with other employee feedback helps you examine relationships between onboarding and other parts of the employee journey, like development and engagement, and even attrition.

Employee engagement drives productivity, revenue, and customer experience. So, it's essential to ensure new hires have a top-notch experience from day one.