Joining
30-day new hire survey
Send this about a month in, once the real work has started, and ask whether the job resembles the one you described in the interview.
Opens this survey in Gists as a draft you can edit. Sign in with Slack, Google or your work email. 30 days free. No card needed.
Six questions, around day 30
How well does the job match what was described during hiring?
1 = very different, 5 = very close
How confident do you feel about what success looks like in your role?
1 = not at all, 5 = very confident
How would you describe your workload right now?
Pick one
- Much too light
- A bit light
- About right
- A bit heavy
- Much too heavy
- Hard to say yet
Do you have at least one person outside your manager you feel comfortable asking for help?
Yes or no
Which areas would you like more support with?
Pick any, optional
- Product or service knowledge
- Internal processes
- Tools and systems
- Team priorities
- Relationships with other teams
- Nothing right now
What is one thing that would make your next 30 days better?
Written answer, optional
We wrote these questions for this survey and they are not a validated scale. You can edit them once the survey opens in Gists. If you copy them into another tool, check what it records about who answered.
Before you run this
Be plain with new hires about who sees their answers. In Gists, a single person's result isn't shown until 5 people have answered, so this works across a group of joiners. To act on one person's answers, have their manager ask them directly.
The decision it helps with
Are new hires settling in, and did recruiting describe the job accurately?
Running it
Around day 30, for each joiner. Read results across a group, since Gists shows nothing from fewer than 5 answers.
What the results might look like
These are made-up examples to show the patterns, not real data.
Jobs don't match their descriptions
an average of 2.3 on question 1 across a hiring quarter.
- What it means
- What was promised and what arrived differ for a good share of joiners.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't mean they're about to leave, or that recruiting misled them on purpose. Roles shift between offer and start.
- What to do
- Recruiting and hiring managers compare recent adverts with the jobs people actually got.
Low confidence about what good looks like
2 on question 2 and an “About right” workload.
- What it means
- They have enough to do and aren't sure it's the right work.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't show a lack of ability. A month in, this is often the manager's to fix.
- What to do
- Ask managers to write down three outcomes for each new hire by the end of the first month.
No one to ask besides the manager
a third of joiners answer “No” on question 4.
- What it means
- A good share of joiners have only one route for help.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't mean those people are isolated in general.
- What to do
- Assign a peer to every starter from now on, someone doing similar work.
What to tell people afterwards
Tell later joiners what you changed because of what earlier ones said.
What to measure next, and when
Send the 90-day survey at the three-month mark, and compare role-match answers by hiring quarter.
When the answers are bad
A low score on question 1 goes to recruiting and the hiring manager; compare it with the same question in your exit survey, and if both are low you probably have a hiring problem showing up as a retention problem. Low confidence about what success looks like is quicker to deal with, since the manager can write down three outcomes for the next quarter and go through them with the person. Someone with no one to ask outside their manager needs an introduction this week.
Two findings behind the form
A four-wave study across seven organizations found that what people knew before starting, their own initiative, and support from the organization, supervisors and coworkers were each related to adjustment independently of one another (Kammeyer-Mueller & Wanberg, 2003). We take that as a reason to look at the team as well as the manager when someone is struggling.
Role ambiguity has a modest negative relationship with job performance, r = -.21 in Tubre and Collins's meta-analysis (Tubre & Collins, 2000). That's a small effect, and we include question 2 mainly because unclear goals are cheap to fix.
What day 90 adds
The 90-day survey comes later and reviews the programme as a whole.
Results and small cohorts
Results show only when 5 or more people answer. A team below 5 rolls up into the team above it. A group is also held back when comparing it with another group could reveal a small team. HR and named leaders see every team with 5 or more answers. Each manager sees only their own team. Employees see no team scores. Themes only by default. Word-for-word answers are a company setting, off unless turned on, and employees see a notice before they write.
Related
Sources
- Kammeyer-Mueller, J. D., Wanberg, C. R. (2003). Unwrapping the organizational entry process: Disentangling multiple antecedents and their pathways to adjustment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 779-794. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.88.5.779
- Tubre, T. C., Collins, J. M. (2000). Jackson and Schuler (1985) Revisited: A Meta-Analysis of the Relationships Between Role Ambiguity, Role Conflict, and Job Performance. Journal of Management, 26, 155-169. doi:10.1177/014920630002600104