A detailed deep-dive process to understand new employee hiring and onboarding experience is critical to enhancing the recruitment processes of an organization. Onboarding surveys are vital tools to achieve this goal. HR professionals prepare comprehensive questionnaires to cover different aspects of the recruitment experience of the new hires.
This article looks into onboarding surveys with the 30-60-90 days questionnaire templates for new hires.
Onboarding Survey
Meaning
An onboarding or new hire survey is a set of questions a company asks newly-hired employees as part of their onboarding process.
The objective of the survey is to find out how their hiring experience went, from the first contact with the HR executive to the multiple interview rounds, induction, and the first few months in their new roles.
While HR can conduct surveys in person at the workplace, they conduct virtual onboarding surveys using digital tools to collect feedback from remote employees.
Importance
The early experiences of new hires build an overall perception of the organization and a long-lasting impression in their minds. The experiences further impact their future engagement, motivation, and likelihood to stay.
A well-planned and executed onboarding survey is thus essential for measuring employee satisfaction levels with the onboarding process and forging positive perceptions in their minds.
Organizations must use innovative tools like survey forms, face-to-face feedback, etc. to listen to their recruits and understand their needs. It can reveal whether the onboarding program answers their queries, prepares them for their new jobs, and sets them up to build a thriving long-term career in the organization.
Benefits
Onboarding surveys help recruits to:
- Understand the social and professional setup of the organization
- Share feedback on gaps in the onboarding process
- Raise concerns on training needs, work obstacles, and discords with team members or managers
Onboarding surveys help organizations to:
- Understand how new employees feel about the onboarding process, work culture, core values and policies
- Assess the effectiveness of onboarding processes and identify gaps
- Notice the red flags on issues employees are facing in their new jobs
- Analyze and work on feedback to optimize their investment in onboarding programs and fill execution gaps
- Enhance employee engagement, employee retention rate, and overall work productivity
Best Practices
Since an onboarding survey is crucial for gauging and refining the processes with the help of recruitment system, you must ensure you are conducting it right to get the most out of it. Follow the below-mentioned best practices to enhance the utility of the surveys:
Keep the questionnaire simple, easy, and brief
When starting a new job, new hires are often not interested in filling out long, complex, and jargon-filled forms. Hence, prepare a short and to-the-point onboarding survey questionnaire they can fill in easily and quickly. Incorporate more multiple-choice and rating questions (close-ended) and less subjective (open-ended) ones to make it less cumbersome for them.
Ask appropriate questions
According to a McKinsey market research report, asking your employees questions changes behaviors and drives action. So, ask relevant employee onboarding survey questions that stimulate reactions. Customize questions as per the requirements and purpose of the survey.
Conduct onboarding surveys at periodic intervals
Unlike popular opinion, executing a survey is not a one-time task that you only do when you onboard new employees. You should conduct surveys occasionally, even after new hires join your company and start working in their new roles. 30, 60, and 90 days onboarding surveys are the typical broad timelines for conducting surveys. Surveying after the defined timelines makes it lose its purpose and fails to provide relevant feedback.
Act on the feedback
The purpose of surveys gets defeated if you do not act on the feedback. Improve current processes to enhance the onboarding and recruitment experience for future employees.
Onboarding Survey Questionnaire
Onboarding surveys are the best mechanism to know the new employee’s pulse. Invest in designing interesting onboarding survey questionnaires within 30, 60, and 90 days of their joining to keep track of the progress and get valuable feedback on the company’s onboarding programs.
New Hire Orientation Survey
From your new hires, you can request the feedback and ask relevant questions as follows:
- Is orientation informative, highly engaging and useful?
- Is the length of new hire orientation was effective enough to keep you engaged and retain all of the information?
- Do you have a better understanding of the company, its leaders, and its different departments.
- Do you have a good understanding of our company’s products/ services?
- Do you know where to find payroll information?
- Do you know where to go for medical benefits enrollment?
- Do you know how to contact IT for technology issues?
- Is the amount of interactions with other new hires met your expectations?
- Is the overall orientation experience reflected the culture and values of the company?
- Based on your onboarding experience. How likely you to recommend this onboarding program to others?
Additional Questions:
- What was your favorite part of orientation?
- What would you like to add in orientation program?
- What was your least favorite part of orientation?
- Additional comments or thoughts
P.S.- You can either use the scale or emojis to help new joinees in reviewing their experience
Virtual/Remote Employee Onboarding Survey Questionnaire
- Multiple Choice Questions: Yes/No/Can’t Say
- Do you feel connected to the rest of the team (the in-office and remote co-workers)?
- Do you have remote access to all the information, tools, and resources you need to perform your role?
- Has the virtual onboarding experience affected your potential or your work performance in any aspect?
- Does your position enable work-life balance?
- Are you satisfied with the company’s work-from-home policies?
- Did you get assistance in finishing the digital paperwork/documentation?
- Numeral Rating Scale
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your virtual onboarding experience?
- (1 = Terrible, 10 = Excellent)
- Likert Scale
- How satisfied do you feel about your online interactions (through video calls, emails, and chats/messages) with your manager and colleagues?
- Highly satisfied
- Satisfied
- Neutral
- Dissatisfied
- Highly dissatisfied
- Open-ended Questions
- What were the challenges you faced during virtual onboarding?
- What changes would you suggest in our virtual onboarding process to improve the hiring experience of our remote employees?
- Do you have any suggestions for how you can better connect with the team?
30-Day Onboarding Survey Questionnaire
- Multiple Choice Questions: Yes/No/Can’t Say
- The levels and duration of interview rounds were apt and justifiable.
- The HR team was readily available to address my concerns and queries.
- My manager introduced me to my co-workers, and I received a warm welcome from my team on the first day.
- I clearly understand the organization’s culture, values, and goals..
- Numeral Rating Scale
- On a scale of 1 to 5, rate the complexity of the new hiring paperwork.
- (5 = Extremely Simple, 1 = Extremely Complex)
- Likert Scale
- How satisfied do you feel about your job role and responsibilities?
- Extremely satisfied
- Satisfied
- Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
- Dissatisfied
- Extremely dissatisfied
- Open-ended Questions
- In your opinion, what is the best part of our onboarding process?
- What changes could be made to the onboarding process to make it more engaging for new employees?
OR- What additional tools and resources would you suggest for enhancing the onboarding experience of new hires?
60-Day Onboarding Survey Questionnaire
- Multiple Choice Questions: Yes/No/Can’t Say
- Did you receive all the training relevant to your role to develop or strengthen your skills?
- Do you have regular discussions with your manager on their work expectations from you in this role?
- Are your work responsibilities in line with the job description?
- Do you have all the information, tools, and resources you need to be successful in your job?
- Numeral Rating Scale
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how valued do you feel at work by your co-workers and leaders?
- (1 = Feel Extremely Unvalued; 10 = Feel Extremely Valued)
On a scale of 1 to 5, rate the relevance of the training you received to perform your job well.
(5 = Extremely Relevant; 1 = Extremely Irrelevant)
- Likert Scale
- How much does your job role match your work expectations?
- Completely
- To a great extent
- Moderately
- Not at all
- Too early to say
- Open-ended Questions
- How has the onboarding plan helped you
- What are the most rewarding and least rewarding projects or tasks in your current position?
90-Day Onboarding Survey Questionnaire
- Multiple Choice Questions: Yes/No/Can’t Say
- I have a good idea about the new learnings/future training required to perform my job well.
- My manager provides regular and constructive feedback to help me improve my performance.
- I have reached my 90-day performance goals.
- I have adjusted well to my new job position and the organizational structure.
- Numeral Rating Scale
- On a scale of 1 to 10, rate the extended onboarding program of the company.
- (1 = Least Beneficial; 10 = Highly Beneficial)
On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you recommend your peers to work in our organization?
(1 = Least Likely; 10 = Most Likely)
- Likert Scale
- Choose the correct answer to the following statement – ‘I feel optimistic about my promotion plan and career growth.’
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
- Open-ended Questions
- What were the main challenges you faced while performing your role in the past three months?
- What part of our onboarding process has worked best for you in fitting into the overall organizational setup?
Automating Onboarding Survey Questions
In today’s times, organizations are investing in innovative, end-to-end HRMS software to manage their human resources. Automating onboarding processes has proved to be a beneficial step for many organizations.
However, because there are many HR tech solutions available in the market; you might feel overwhelmed when making a choice.
The right HR automation tool will definitely be able to perform the below listed regarding onboarding questionnaire automation:
- 30-60-90 days survey templates customized and shared in just a few clicks
- Automatically send onboarding surveys to new hires based on their hiring dates
- Edit fields and questions to customize questionnaires as per requirements
- Upgrade from physical, pen-paper form-filling methods to digitized templates such as spreadsheets, Google forms, and databases
- Send automated reminders for sharing onboarding survey questionnaires to new hires 30, 60, and 90 days after their joining
- Provide cloud storage services to save and archive data for easy accessibility
Automating onboarding survey processes put organizations on the path to advancement and helps them increase employee retention rates. It also enables a good onboarding experience for new hires, thereby creating long-lasting, positive impressions in their minds.
Takeaway
Onboarding surveys play a significant role in gaining insights into the effectiveness of recruitment programs. The first-hand responses of new hires provide qualitative and quantitative data. HR teams can leverage this data to reform recruitment processes and provide a positive onboarding experience to future recruits.
Automating onboarding surveys using technologically advanced tools is a smart step for gathering feedback. It can help enable high employee engagement and retention.