How successful are your hiring campaigns? Do you easily find great talent for your company?
If so, how long do they stick around? If you’re struggling with retaining employees, then there may be something wrong with the onboarding process.
The only way to know is to ask. This is why we recommend conducting a new hire survey.
Maybe then you can save your business from the woes other companies have. For example, 33% of new hires leave to a new job within the first six months.
And another 23% are gone before their first anniversary rolls around. Dealing with turnover rates like this costs businesses between 100% and 300% of the employee’s salary you’re replacing.
Then you may not even see the full productivity potential of a worker until eight months after being hired. In other words, if your new hires are sticking around for only six months, then your productivity rates are going to suffer tremendously.
One way around this is to streamline your onboarding process so your new hires are properly trained and provided with the appropriate amount of support. Stats show new hires are 58% more likely to stay with a company after three years when there’s a structured onboarding process.
Your onboarding process only sets the foundation to a great career. It’s also important to ask questions during the first few months to see what improvements you can make to the workplace.
Want to know how your workplace is fairing? We’ll share several questions you can ask in your new hire survey to find out.
Let’s review!
The Benefits of New Hire Surveys
Getting feedback about your business processes is key to making the necessary improvements for success. A part of this is questioning new hires about the hiring process.
By giving new hires a survey, you can learn how to enhance the onboarding process. However, in order to do this successfully, you have to ask specific questions so you can pinpoint exactly what’s wrong.
Simply asking if they liked the process or think there’s room for improvement isn’t enough. You need to get feedback about what part of the onboarding process needs tweaking and in what way.
Leaving space for surveyors to leave their thoughts is key.
By giving new hire surveys, you can potentially reduce your turnover rate. This is because you’re getting feedback early on and if you act quickly, you can rectify the issue before it becomes a major concern.
You can also create a culture where employee feedback is commonplace and expected so HR and management can continue to improve the workplace.
Needless to say, this will give your employer brand a great reputation and will help to attract more and better talent to your company.
How to Distribute Your New Hire Survey
There are multiple ways you can hand out your surveys. You can give them a paper-based survey to fill out – but this will be more time-consuming to go over all the answers.
The easier route is to use an online form creation tool that will allow you to gather all of the surveys and even compare the results. You can quickly find trends to see which matters to focus on first.
If you have a platform new hires use during the onboarding process, you can distribute the survey through this platform. Or you can email it to them.
Information to Gather from Your New Hire Survey
When it comes time to create your new hire survey, you want to try and gather key insights. Each organization will have its own survey that’s unique to its organization.
But there’s data that’s critical no matter the industry you’re in. For instance, you’ll want to have recruiting KPIs and goals created to help you determine if your onboarding process is meeting those goals.
Then the values your company set forth will also help to identify if your onboarding process is in line with the experience your new hires have. If your values aren’t being instilled in new hires, then there’s room for improvement.
Next, let’s take a look at 10 questions you can ask in your new hire survey.
Ask About the Recruitment Process
Within the first few days or so, it’s good to inquire about how new hires feel about the recruitment process. They’ve already undergone the training and are just starting to implement what they’ve learned.
This is the time to gather feedback regarding the information they received and how satisfied they are with the overall process.
Example questions can be:
1. Were you given accurate information during the recruitment phase?
2. What improvements can we make to the recruitment process?
Take this information and compare it to the answers other new recruits give to see what needs immediate attention.
Ask About their First Week
Don’t wait too long before you survey new hires. Why not do so in their first week? Things are still quite new at this time, but this is where you can gauge how well they were onboarded.
After all, the aim is to get your employees to hit the ground running (or somewhere close to it). So to get an idea of the employee’s first impressions, you can ask questions like:
3. What do you like most about your new position here?
4. What aspects of your new position worry you?
Knowing the positives and the negatives will give you the insight you need to make improvements in management and the overall workplace.
Ask About Why they Joined Your Company
Learning the reasons behind an employee’s intentions with working for your company is key. This will help you to identify what attracts employees to your business.
Your marketers can then use this to improve recruitment and enhance your employer value proposition efforts. Some questions you can ask to learn about this include:
5. Why did you decide to join our company?
6. What were you doing prior to working for us?
Ask About their Engagement with Your Company
The questions you ask in this category is crucial to learning about the tenure of new hires. How long are they likely to stay with your business?
Better yet, how happy are they with your company? Some questions you can ask to find this out include:
7. Are you proud to work for our company? Why?
8. Do you think about looking for work in another company?
9. How long do you see yourself working for our company?
10. How likely are you to recommend our company to others?
There’s a lot you can learn in the answers employees give regarding their views of your workplace. You may find you need to make changes in how your management runs things to ensure everyone’s satisfied.
Ask About the Processes and Systems Used in their Position
Every employee has workflows, processes, and systems to use in their particular position. It's important to understand how they feel about them.
The idea is to learn what shortcomings there are in their processes and systems so you can make them more efficient. Your job is to implement workflows that boost productivity in your workplace.
For example, if your document workflows are a bit slow, you can use an e-signature platform like Xodo Sign to make the signing of documents faster.
Some questions you can use to figure this all out include:
11. Are you confident in the systems in your role?
12. Is the information you’re given at the right level for you?
13. Are the workflows and systems you use efficient?
Ask About Organizational Alignment
Every business should have a mission statement, core values, and a workplace culture they try to display and instill in employees. You worked hard to create the vision, but ensuring it’s coming to fruition is another story.
You can learn more about whether or not your employees are aligned with your organizational goals and values by asking the following questions:
14. Are your values aligned with the values of our company?
15. Do you understand how your role contributes to the organizational goals of our company?
16. Has your experience working with us matched your expectations?
It’s important that your employees both understand your values and goals and the role they play in reaching them. If they don’t, then you need to make improvements to your initial and ongoing training to ensure consistent alignment within the workplace.
Creating a Workplace New Hires Love
Every business wants to be the place where everyone wants to work. But bringing this concept to reality is hard when your focus isn’t on your employees.
It’s good practice to use surveys for both your new hires and long-term employees. Understanding how their perception changes in their role at your company can be very telling.
Hopefully, you’re able to maintain a happy workforce, which is definitely possible when you’re always collecting feedback from your workplace. With the above list of questions, you can learn valuable insights from your new hires.
All there’s left to do now is to create your new hire survey and begin using it. Be sure to have a system in place that makes it easy to collect and analyze your data.
Then come back and let us know in the comments how your new hire survey has improved your processes and systems!