Over the past few years, there has been a major effort to attract new talent and increase employee retention rates.
Since 2021, we’ve gone from “the great resignation” to “quiet quitting” to “quiet hiring”.
These changes have left hiring managers and human resources professionals feeling the pressure to keep strong efforts on employee recruitment and attrition.
Sure, employee surveys are a great way to keep the pulse on satisfaction and engagement.
But, new hire employee surveys are specifically designed to measure satisfaction with the hiring process and first impressions of their time at the organization.
Learn more about how and why conducting new hire surveys are a great addition to your employee engagement efforts.
What Employee Onboarding Surveys?
Employee onboarding surveys, also referred to as employee new hire surveys, aim to measure satisfaction with onboarding, measure a few employee engagement key performance indicators (i.e., likelihood to recommend, factors of importance), and more.
You can think of it as a short, concise version of an employee survey.
Additionally, questions for a new hire survey are completely customized to the unique needs of your organization.
Perhaps you want to…
- Remeasure a few KPIs identified in a prior employee survey
- Understand how new hires found out about the position
- Understand what factors drove new hires to choose the position
- Measure how likely new hires are to look for other employment within the next 6 months
- Gather feedback on the onboarding process
- Or measure something else!
Importance of Conducting Onboarding Surveys
Conducting an onboarding surveys is are helpful to hiring managers and human resources professionals.
Ultimately, the survey is custom-written based on the unique needs of an organization.
It can help inform insight into employee engagement, onboarding processes, workplace culture, and other areas that may cause employees to look for a new job.
For context, 91% of new employees will look for a new job if it wasn’t what they expected or don’t like the company culture.
Therefore, when looking to improve employee retention, surveys will provide data-driven insights into areas of dissatisfaction and how to resolve them.
Other benefits of conducting new hire employee surveys include:
- The ability to have a portal for new hire feedback
- Opportunity to create follow-up conversations based on the data and insight gathered
- Measuring satisfaction and other areas of interest
- Understanding improvement areas
- Understanding drivers to key metrics (i.e., satisfaction)
- The ability to breakdown the results by different factors (i.e., department, shift)
- Improving processes/communication
- Showing employees you care
- Using the results as a driver for change/improvement
- Featuring the results in future recruitment initiatives
Onboarding Employee Survey Example Questions
Here are a few example questions for a new hire employee survey. As a reminder, these questions can are uniquely written.
It's always important to first assess the goals and objectives of your company before writing the survey.
- How did you first learn about [insert organization]? Select all that apply.
- Which of the following best describes why you chose to join [insert organization]? Select all that apply.
- How satisfied were you with the onboarding experience at [insert organization]? Select one.
- Please explain why you rated the onboarding experience at [insert organization] as [insert response] out of 5. Enter your response below.
- How likely are you to recommend [insert organization] as a place to work? Select a rating.
- Please explain why you rated [insert organization] as [insert response] out of 10. Enter your response below.
- In the next 6 months, how likely are you to look for employment outside of [insert response]? Select a rating.
- If you could change one thing about [insert response] to improve your satisfaction as an employee, what would it be? Enter your response below.
- Do you have any final thoughts or comments? Enter your response below.
Process for Surveying New Hires
The process for getting feedback from new employees is easy, especially if you use a third party for employee surveys.
By partnering with an employee survey company like Drive Research, leadership teams and HR professionals rely on their expertise to execute the study correctly.
Whereas newly hired staff benefit from this partnership because they are given an outlet to provide honest answers with full autonomy.
It’s a win, win.
Here is the process Drive Research follows when conducting new hire employee surveys.
1. Kickoff
After you decide to conduct a new hire employee survey, the research team will set up a meeting to kick off the project with you.
The main purpose of this meeting is to:
- Meet your dedicated project team and points of contact
- Understand the goals and objectives of the survey
- Review the process and timeline of the project
- Answer any questions
2. Survey design
Once the kickoff meeting is complete, the research team will design the survey.
During this process, the research team will use best practices to design effective questions to best meet the needs of the client.
3. Preparing for fieldwork
Once the survey design is complete, the team will also need to exchange an employee database with the new hires for the survey to be sent to.
The client team will also send a pre-survey notice to new hires, letting them know the survey is coming and who to expect it to come from.
Remember, communication is key!
Sending out a pre-survey notice helps add credibility to the survey, which ultimately helps increase your employee survey response rates.
4. Conducting fieldwork
Oftentimes, asking employees to take a staff satisfaction survey is the easy part of the process!
During this step, our team will send at least 3 survey invites to employees (email reminders are only sent to non-responders).
The research team will also work closely with the client team so they stay in the loop on the response rate. Fieldwork for employee surveys usually lasts 2 weeks to account for those who are out of the office for vacation or sick time.
5. Analysis and reporting
After fieldwork is completed the research team will begin analyzing and reporting on the data.
Types of reports may include:
- A scorecard which is a simple overview of the results
- A topline report which is a brief summary of the results
- A comprehensive report which is a detailed summary of the results with supporting visualizations
Best Practices For Onboarding Surveys
Great onboarding surveys change all the time as companies evolve. However, there are a couple of rules to follow in order to maintain a great survey to use for onboarding.
- Using milestones. Some companies choose to use milestones for their onboarding surveys - after specific times (like 1 month, 3 months, 6 months) companies will send a follow up to the original onboarding survey. While this complexity of follow up is not required, it is a great idea to include some sort of a follow up to the original onboarding survey.
- Ask different questions about the hiring experience. Finding out more about why your new employee decided to work for you can be revealing in a good way. It’s also possible to ask about the recruitment process, what was good, bad, or what they didn’t care for. This can help for future hiring and recruiting.
- Use open-ended questions. Using open ended questions where appropriate is another way to get more detailed information from new hires. It can allow employees to expand on certain topics or answers that they have more feedback on.
Conduct Onboarding Employee Surveys with Drive Research
Drive Research is an employee survey company serving organizations nationally and worldwide.
Our team has the knowledge and tools to design an employee study or new hire survey, should it be the right fit for your organization.
Interested in learning more about our market research services? Reach out through any of the four ways below.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
Emily Taylor
As Director of Operations, Emily does more than wrangle data. Her work includes executing company OKRs, company-wide project management, training/onboarding, team culture initiatives, and more!
Learn more about Emily, here.
