Create and Schedule Onboarding Surveys for New Hires

Onboard enables you to send onboarding surveys to anyone, at any time, using any content, with multiple questions in one survey. There's many great ways you can customize your surveys to suit your organization.

In this article: 


Note: By default, all onboard surveys are visible surveys. That means admins and managers can identify which submitted survey responses belong to which employee.


Now Available - Draft Mode

You can create and save a survey in draft mode, so you can leave and come back at any time and continue to work on the survey without losing your work.  

A survey only needs the survey name to be saved as a draft. Note: When in draft mode, the survey will not be sent to any employee.


New hires will receive the onboard surveys if:

  • Your new hires have the Onboard app turned on. 
  • Your new hires have their start date attributes uploaded. Note: Make sure to have the start date uploaded for your new hires. 
    • To do this, navigate to Settings > User Management to add a start date individually or contact your Customer Success Manager to update user start dates in bulk. 
  • Your new hires meet the attribute conditions that you set for the surveys. 

You can design your onboard program in any way you like. 

For example: you can send a week 1 survey to all new hires, and then a unique week 3 survey to only the Customer Success team, and a unique week 4 survey to the Developers team. 

To do so, click on Set Audience, then configure the audience conditions as you wish. 

  • All New Company Hires means the survey will be sent to all new hires, regardless of their gender, department, location, etc. 
  • Saved Group New Hires allows you to send the survey to new hires that are included in chosen saved groups. This is convenient if you already have the saved groups set up for your organizations and you have different onboard programs planned for different saved groups
  • Custom New Hires allows you to send the survey to new hires that have attributes matching the chosen conditions. 

Scheduling Onboard Surveys 

Click on Set Schedule and configure the schedule conditions that suit your organization best, as far out as 100 weeks from the employees' start date! 


  • Week is the week you want the new hires to receive the survey. For example:  
    • Week 1 means the new hires will receive the survey within the first week of their start date. 
    • Week 12 means they will receive the survey during the 12th week from their start date. 
  • Workday is the day you want the new hire to receive the survey within the Week chosen above. This is a great way to build habits and expectations for your new hires for what days your company will usually be sending surveys. 
  • Time is the hour you want the new hires to receive the survey. Note: The survey sending hour will be in the new hires' timezone. 
  • Duration is the time length you want the survey to be opened for.

Not everyone starts a new job on a Monday

As everyone’s onboarding is different, there are some intricacies to the survey schedule. 

  • If an employee’s start date is on Monday and the survey schedule is set to Wednesday in week 1, the employee will receive the survey on Wednesday of the same week. 
  • If an employee’s start date is on Thursday and the survey schedule is set to Wednesday in week 1, the employee will receive the survey on the following Wednesday
  • Even though the start days are different, the employee will still receive the week 1 survey within one week from their start date, making sure that the survey stays relevant to the new hires. 

Freedom to ask the questions that are best suited to the employees. 

Remember how we said you could tailor specific surveys to different departments, office locations or other groups? 


  • Choose questions that align to the employees job, from the existing Content Library
  • If you have something specific in mind, create your own custom questions.
  • You can even choose the question type, such as scale, matrix grid, boolean, and more.

Tailor the survey notification emails to match the survey content 

This is a great way to encourage participation in the onboarding process. To customize the notification email:  


  • In the Personalize Survey Email step, click on Edit
  • Type out the email subject line and email body as you like. 

  • Once you are happy with the survey draft, click Launch to make the survey active. 
  • The system will start sending the survey to any new hires who meet the audience and schedule conditions. 
    • Note: Once the survey has been launched, the survey cannot be edited. 
  • For active surveys, you can close the survey anytime. 
    • After the survey has been closed, it will be marked as completed and will no longer be sent to new hires from that point onward.

Have some more questions? Reach out to your Customer Success contact or our Support team and we'll be glad to help!

Did you find it helpful? Yes No

Send feedback
Sorry we couldn't be helpful. Help us improve this article with your feedback.