16 Questions to Ask During Onboarding a New Employee

While you probably feel pretty good about your current employee onboarding practices, you may be surprised at how they strike a new hire.

Are they as helpful and welcoming as you intend?

If you’re not sure, you might be best off asking the hires directly.

Your new employees offer you a unique opportunity to assess your orientation techniques. The experience is still fresh in their minds and their success on a daily basis is still largely dependent your onboarding program.

Asking new hires about their onboarding experiences also fits right in with your commitment to tracking employee engagement starting on Day One. And whether we like it or not, first impressions matter — at least to some extent. The more engaged employees are during the first days, the more likely they are to remain engaged thereafter.

And on the flip side, if employees aren’t engaged during their first days, chances are they’ll never realize their full talent potential while they work for you.

If you want to make sure your hiring and employee onboarding processes are as engaging as possible, here are some questions you may want to consider asking your new hires as they get comfortable working in a new environment.

Questions to Ask at the End of the First Week

Your hire has just completed their first week, and chances are it all still feels pretty new. Try to get a sense of their first impressions by asking:

01. What thing strikes you most about your new job?

02. What aspect of your job excites you?

03. What aspect of your job worries you?

04. If you can describe your onboarding in one word, what would that word be?

Questions to Ask After Two Weeks on the Job

Your new employee is starting to settle in and has probably developed some opinions about the job and how well the onboarding process is working out. It’s a good time to ask:

05. Do you feel like you’ve been well prepared for your work?

06. Would you say you’re beginning to master your responsibilities?

07. Is the assistance you’ve been receiving as you get acclimated helpful or a distraction?

08. Are you having to ask a lot of questions about topics not covered in your training?

Questions to Ask After a Month on the Job

Your employee is probably beginning to feel comfortable in their position, and their onboarding is now either paying off — or not. Try asking:

09. Do you feel like the training was relevant to the specifics of what you do?

10. Is there anything you wish you’d been told?

11. Should onboarding have been longer, shorter, or was it just about right?

12. Do you have the knowledge you need to succeed?

Questions to Ask After Three Months on the Job

The novelty of the new job has probably worn off, and your new hire is simply hard at work. Onboarding’s in the past, and your now-experienced employee is ready to look back via questions like:

13. Was your onboarding successful?

14. Did your onboarding make you feel more or less confident that you could do your job well?

15. Is there any kind of information you could’ve done with more of?

16. Would you tell a friend coming to your company that the early days are nothing to worry about?

The answers to these questions or others like them should give you a pretty good idea as to what, if anything, needs to be changed with respect to your onboardingprocess.

Be sure to thank your new hires for their honesty, reassuring them that their answers won’t adversely affect the way management feels about them as employees. After all, the goal of your questions is simply to make sure that the folks who are hired next have an even better employee onboarding experience.

Use this type of data to improve your employee onboarding process and you increase the chances that your new hires will stick around. As a result, you’ll enjoy increased employee retention, a stronger workforce, and a healthier bottom line.