An employee onboarding survey enables you to get feedback from new hires and improve your onboarding process. We cover everything you need to know about onboarding surveys and highlight 10 onboarding survey questions you should ask.
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Your company’s onboarding process is the first impression your business makes on new hires. It’s important to make the process as good as possible, or else you risk talented new employees feeling disengaged and considering leaving your business
One of the best ways to improve your onboarding process is to ask new employees to take an onboarding survey. This can reveal how employees feel about your onboarding process, including where your business has room to leave a stronger mark.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about employee onboarding surveys and highlight 10 onboarding survey questions you should ask.
Key Takeaways
- Your company’s onboarding process plays an important role in making new hires feel connected to your company and comfortable in their job.
- An employee onboarding survey asks new hires for feedback on your onboarding process so that you can make improvements.
- An onboarding survey lets employees’ voices be heard and increases engagement with your company.
- Survey questions for new hires should ask about their onboarding experience, including whether they understand their job and feel welcome at your company.
What is an Onboarding Survey?
An onboarding survey, also called a new hire survey, is a questionnaire that asks new employees for feedback on your company’s onboarding process.
The goal of onboarding surveys is to help HR managers improve the onboarding process. With employee feedback, HR administrators can decide what works, what doesn’t, and where to invest the company’s onboarding budget.
These surveys can cover a wide range of topics about an employee’s pre-hire experience and their first few months on the job. For example, an onboarding survey might ask about:
- How an employee heard about your company
- How the employee felt about the job application and interview process
- Whether the employee found your company’s new hire training program effective
- How engaged the employee feels after a few months on the job
- Whether the employee sees themselves staying at your company
You should ask employees to take an onboarding survey within a few months of hiring them. Ideally, send the survey after an employee has been fully onboarded but while the experience is still fresh.
Onboarding surveys are often anonymous, as many employees feel more comfortable giving honest feedback when their name isn’t attached to the responses.
Benefits of a Powerful Onboarding Survey
An employee’s first few months on the job are a critical time in their tenure at your organization. This is when they’re deciding whether or not they like working for your company and whether they plan to stay. One-third of new hires consider leaving a job within their first 6 months, but a good onboarding process can change that.
Asking your new hires to take an onboarding survey can help your company in several important ways.
First, the survey itself is part of employees’ onboarding experience. It gives them a chance to share direct feedback about their experience. Surveys are a great way to engage employees and make them feel heard.
Additionally, the data you collect from onboarding surveys can help you measure the effectiveness of your onboarding process. If one component of your process—for example, your new employee orientation— falls short, survey responses will highlight that problem and enable you to address it.
As you make improvements to your onboarding process based on feedback, you can provide a better experience for every new hire your business makes. That can increase the degree to which new employees engage with your business and improve your employee retention rate.
Onboarding Survey Best Practices
To get the most out of your employee onboarding surveys, it’s important to follow a few best practices.
Enable employees to respond anonymously
Many employees are more comfortable being honest about their onboarding experience when they know their responses are anonymous. If your company is small or hires new employees infrequently, it may be difficult to keep surveys anonymous. However, you can still assure new employees that their responses will be kept confidential.
Update your survey over time
Your business, your onboarding process, your company culture, and more will all change over time. Keep your survey up-to-date with an annual review. Add new questions, adjust ones to be more relevant, and remove anything that’s outdated.
Time your survey to coincide with an onboarding milestone
You can send your new hire survey after an orientation event, after an employee completes their training, or after an employee has been on the job for 30 days. In any case, be sure to keep the timing consistent for each new employee you survey.
Seek other forms of feedback after conducting onboarding surveys
Your onboarding survey should be just one of several pieces of information you use to evaluate how new employees are doing. You should also consider employee engagement surveys and performance reviews.
Use software to automate your surveys and analyze the data
HR software like Connecteam can send surveys to new hires automatically as well as remind them to complete surveys. These tools typically also offer analytics dashboards to help you identify trends in employees’ responses and make more data-driven decisions.
10 Powerful Onboarding Questions for New Hires
The questions in your onboarding survey should be designed to give you specific, actionable information about employees’ experiences.
In addition, your questions should be tailored to the specific needs of your business and the components of your onboarding process that you want to improve.
Here are 10 survey questions for new hires to include.
Do the responsibilities of your job match your expectations?
How you describe a job in your job listing and during interviews can significantly impact what employees expect when they get into the role. If an employee finds that a role’s responsibilities don’t match their expectations, they may think about looking for another job.
This question can help you identify whether you need to re-evaluate a job description or the role itself.
💡 Pro Tip:
Re-evaluate each job description before posting it to ensure it accurately reflects a role’s current responsibilities. If possible, ask an outgoing employee to list all of their responsibilities and rank them by importance or time commitment.
Do you understand how your role contributes to our business’s mission?
Employees want to feel like their job is important to the business. Otherwise, they could become disengaged or feel like their work is unimportant.
This question can reveal whether your onboarding process does enough to highlight how an employee fits into your company mission.
Do you feel like you received adequate training for your role?
Employee training is an important part of the onboarding process. It ensures that employees know not only how to work effectively but also where to go if they need help.
🧠 Did You Know?
Connecteam enables you to create customized training courses and publish them for your new hires to complete whenever it’s most convenient for them, right from their mobile devices.
Do you feel welcome at our company?
The employee onboarding process should make new hires feel needed and welcome. If it doesn’t, employees may not feel connected to your business or invested in their jobs. They may even feel anxious about showing up for work. This can all make them more likely to leave.
Were all of your questions answered during the onboarding process?
New hires should view onboarding as an opportunity to ask questions—about their job, the company, employee policies, and more.
If they feel like not all of their questions were answered, it could be because your onboarding wasn’t comprehensive enough. It could also be because they didn’t feel comfortable asking questions during the onboarding process.
Do you see yourself staying with our company for 5 years? Why or why not?
When asked about long-term plans, employees may be more honest about the things they like or dislike about your company and onboarding process. Employees who feel unsatisfied after your onboarding process may be more likely to question whether they see a future for themselves at your business.
Do you understand the benefits included in your compensation package?
Benefits like health insurance and retirement plans can make up a significant portion of an employee’s compensation. Employees who understand their benefits and how to use them are more likely to feel that they are being compensated fairly for their work.
Thus, it’s important that your onboarding process clearly explains to new hires what benefits are available to them.
How helpful have your conversations with your manager been so far?
Interactions between a new employee and their manager can have a big impact on the employee’s performance and happiness at work. Managers should be actively engaged in the onboarding process and create a welcoming environment for new employees.
If there are issues with how a manager engages with new hires, you may want to consider additional training for that manager.
What was your favorite part of the onboarding process?
While it’s important to learn what aspects of your onboarding could be better, it’s also important to know what aspects are working well. This question can help you determine what parts of your onboarding process to keep or even expand.
What changes would you like to see to the onboarding process?
New employees may have ideas for how to improve the onboarding process that aren’t prompted by your other questions. This question invites a more open-ended response for employees to share their suggestions.
How to Assess Employee Onboarding Survey Results
Once you get survey results from new employees, it’s important to act on that data to make positive changes to your onboarding process.
The first thing you can do is look for trends in your survey responses. If multiple employees mention the same thing, then that’s a strong signal that your onboarding is lacking in a specific area. You can use that insight to adjust your process.
For example, if several employees say that they didn’t receive enough information about their benefits, then you could add to onboarding a training module about how employees can access benefits.
Another thing you should do is let employees know that you’ve heard their feedback and are acting on it. You can send an email summarizing the results of your onboarding survey and describing the changes you plan to make in response. You can also offer follow-up training if there are specific aspects of your onboarding training that fell short.
🧠 Did You Know?
Connecteam has a social media-style updates feed where you can announce major changes to your onboarding process—plus any other important company updates.
After you make changes, it’s important to monitor how effective they are. Modify your onboarding survey to ask specifically about modules you’ve changed.
Additionally, you should compare onboarding survey responses against annual employee engagement survey responses. This enables you to measure whether improvements to your onboarding process increase employee engagement over the long term.
Conclusion
Making your company’s onboarding process the best it can be is critical to engaging and retaining talented employees. Your company spends a lot of time and money recruiting new employees, so you want to do everything possible to ensure they stick around and perform well.
The best way to improve your approach to onboarding is to ask new hires what went well and what could be better. The 10 onboarding survey questions we highlighted in this article are a great place to start.
If you want to learn even more about onboarding, check out our ultimate guide to employee onboarding and our onboarding checklist template.
FAQs
What is an onboarding checklist?
An onboarding checklist is different from an onboarding survey. An onboarding checklist covers tasks that a new employee needs to complete, including training they need to complete and forms they need to submit. An onboarding survey asks employees for feedback about the onboarding process.
When should I send an employee onboarding survey?
You’ll get the best feedback from an onboarding survey if you send it shortly after a major onboarding milestone. That could be the completion of orientation or a major training course, or at the end of an employee’s first month on the job.