Employee Onboarding Feedback Surveys: Why They Matter and What to Ask
A strong onboarding experience shapes an employee’s entire journey with your organisation. It influences engagement, productivity, and long-term retention from the very first day. Yet many organisations still struggle to understand what new employees truly experience during those crucial early weeks.
This is where Employee Onboarding Feedback Surveys become essential.
Gathering structured feedback from new hires enables HR teams to pinpoint what is effective, what needs improvement, and how to continually enhance the employee experience. With well-crafted questions—and the right survey platform you can uncover insights that lead to meaningful, measurable improvements in your onboarding programme.
Why Employee Onboarding Surveys Are Essential
1. Improve the onboarding process at scale
New hires see your organisation with fresh eyes, and their early impressions often reveal opportunities and challenges that long-standing employees may overlook. Surveys allow you to capture this valuable perspective consistently and turn it into actionable insights.
2. Identify gaps before they escalate
Unclear expectations, missing resources, or inconsistent communication may seem minor, but these issues can quickly grow into long-term challenges. A structured feedback survey highlights gaps early, enabling HR teams and managers to address them promptly.
3. Strengthen employee engagement and retention
Employees who feel informed, supported, and heard during their first weeks are far more likely to stay. A well-designed onboarding survey reinforces that their success matters from the very beginning.
4. Standardize measurement and track progress
A consistent survey process allows HR teams to benchmark satisfaction, monitor trends over time, and make data-driven decisions to elevate the onboarding experience year after year.
What Should an Employee Onboarding Feedback Survey Include?
An effective survey is concise, clear, and aligned with the key phases of the onboarding journey.
✔ Pre-boarding experience
- Was communication before your start date clear and timely?
- Did you receive the information you needed to prepare for your first day?
✔ First-day impressions
- How would you rate your initial welcome experience?
- Were your tools, equipment, and accounts set up and ready?
✔ Training and orientation
- Did your orientation sessions provide the knowledge you needed to get started?
- Were training materials well organised and easy to understand?
✔ Role clarity and support
- Do you have a clear understanding of your responsibilities?
- How supported do you feel by your manager and team?
✔ Overall onboarding satisfaction
- How satisfied are you with your overall onboarding experience?
- What improvements would you recommend?
Keeping the survey conversational and easy to navigate encourages honest responses and higher completion rates.
Best Practices for Effective Onboarding Surveys
✔ Send the survey at the right time
The ideal timing is typically 2–4 weeks after the employee’s start date, once they have had enough exposure to the onboarding process to provide meaningful feedback.
✔ Offer anonymity when possible
Anonymous responses encourage honesty and protect employee confidentiality.
✔ Keep it short
Aim for 10–15 thoughtfully selected questions, blending multiple-choice items with one or two open-ended prompts.
✔ Automate the delivery
Platforms like SimpleSurvey allow you to automatically trigger surveys after a set number of days, ensuring a consistent and reliable process.
✔ Track trends and close the loop
Regularly review results, monitor changes over time, and share improvements with leadership and employees. Demonstrating that feedback leads to real action helps build trust and engagement.
Why Use SimpleSurvey for Employee Onboarding Feedback?
SimpleSurvey helps HR teams simplify and strengthen every aspect of their feedback process through:
- Anonymized response options for candid feedback
- WCAG 2.1 AA/AAA-accessible survey designs
- Easy bilingual (EN/FR) configuration
- Automated onboarding workflow triggers
- Advanced reporting tools that highlight trends and themes
- Canadian data residency and compliance
And with our Employee Onboarding Feedback Survey Template, you can launch a polished, ready-to-use survey instantly no need to build one from the ground up.
Start Improving Your Onboarding Experience Today
Remove the guesswork from onboarding. Begin collecting valuable insights with SimpleSurvey’s Employee Onboarding Feedback Survey prebuilt, customisable, and included with your free trial.
Create your free trial account today to access the onboarding feedback survey template. (No credit card required.)