Most organizations treat onboarding as something they do to new hires rather than something with them.
The process is built, steps are mapped, workflows are configured … and it runs. What gets measured (if anything!) is completion: did the new hire finish their forms? Did they complete their I-9? Did they actually show up?
What rarely gets measured is how the new hire actually felt at each stage.
Only 47% of companies formally evaluate their onboarding programs at all, according to Apollo Technical. The other half are running a process with no feedback loop – no signal on what’s working, what’s confusing, or where new hires are starting to disengage.
That’s not a minor oversight – that same research shows when organizations do solicit onboarding feedback, it improves their relationship with employees by 91%. Measuring sentiment is a retention intervention!
Why onboarding is the highest-stakes window for sentiment
The first weeks on the job are when new hires form impressions … and those aren’t easily shaken. According to Insight Global’s Employee Sentiment Report, 22% of workers have left a job within their first 90 days, and it takes the average employee 6 to 7 months to feel fully comfortable in a role.
That means the exact time which a new hire’s sentiment is most volatile – and actionable – stretches across the entire onboarding window. Your first 90 days continue to be critical, and organizations that aren’t measuring during that stretch are flying blind through the highest-risk phase of the employee lifecycle.
Nearly one in three new hires leaves within their first 90 days, and poor onboarding is consistently cited as a contributing factor. The same report found that four in five workers said they’d stay longer in a role if their onboarding had been better.
And if you’re capturing this, you can do something about it.
What makes onboarding distinct from other phases of the employee lifecycle is that the sentiment you’re measuring is fresh, unfiltered, and highly predictive. A new hire who’s confused about a process in week two is more likely to quietly disengage than to raise a hand. By the time that disengagement shows up in a quarterly engagement survey, they may already be interviewing elsewhere.
What sentiment measurement during onboarding actually looks like
Measuring new hire sentiment isn’t the same as deploying an annual engagement survey; cadence, the questions, and intent are different. Onboarding sentiment measurement should happen frequently and in a way that takes 1-2 minutes only so they’re actually completed.
The good news? You can do this with a robust employee onboarding platform that has it – and yes, Click Boarding does with Predictive Indicators.
Pulse checks at key moments
Effective onboarding sentiment programs build touchpoints at natural inflection points: the end of preboarding, the end of week one, the 30-day mark, and the 60-day mark.
Each touchpoint asks different questions relevant to where the new hire is in their journey:
- Preboarding questions focus on clarity and preparedness, such as did the new hire feel informed and welcomed before Day 1?
- Week one questions focus on experience and connection … did they meet the right people, do they understand their role, does the team feel accessible?
- At 30 and 60 days, questions shift toward belonging and growth like do they feel supported, challenged, and like they made the right choice?
Keeping these surveys short (think 2-3 questions) increases completion rates and signals to new hires you’re asking because you want to act, not just collect data. Referencing these in your HR check-ins is also a great way to reinforce!
Quantitative signals worth tracking
There are additional behavioral signals during onboarding that correlate with sentiment and retention risk. Process completion rates (how many steps did a new hire complete, and where did they stall) tell you where friction exists in your experience today.
Time-to-completion on individual tasks can highlight steps that are confusing or overly complex, and login frequency during preboarding is an early indicator of engagement: a candidate who logs in to explore and complete tasks ahead of schedule is more connected than one who waits until the last minute.
Ryan Mohr, our Director of Client Success, frames the measurement challenge this way: “If a client doesn’t know how they’re measuring success, that’s where we focus our time: on how should we be measuring, why isn’t it being measured, and what can we do to help achieve that. If they don’t have a measurement for success, they’re probably not investing in it.”
That applies directly to onboarding sentiment. If you aren’t measuring this, you’re signaling, unintentionally, that the new hire experience isn’t something worth tracking.
Qualitative signals that often go unmeasured
Some of the most valuable sentiment data comes not from surveys but from the interactions that happen around the onboarding process. My team fields a lot of questions from new hires around forms, confusion about steps, or difficulty accessing systems … and these are a direct signal that something in the experience needs attention.
I consistently see new hires reaching out with questions that shouldn’t require a support interaction. As I tell our clients: as you’re building your onboarding process, keep the employee in mind. It’s easy to get focused on your internal agenda: the forms you need signed, the compliance steps you need completed.
It’s also just as easy to lose sight of what that experience feels like from the candidate’s perspective. That gap between what HR intends and what the new hire experiences is one of the most common sources of early disengagement, and it’s entirely preventable if you’re measuring the right signals.
The connection between sentiment data and retention outcomes
Sentiment measurement during onboarding is only valuable if the data connects to decisions. Otherwise, it’s just noise! Treat onboarding feedback as a leading indicator that ties to retention KPIs, even listing this as a key result supporting your quarterly goals.
What does this make possible? It depends.
If new hires at a particular location consistently rate their week-one experience lower than those at other locations, that’s a management or culture signal.
Those in a specific role consistently reporting confusion about their responsibilities at the 30-day mark highlight clarity and expectation-setting issues you can fix before the next round of hires with the same role.
And of preboarding completion rates drop for remote hires, your preboarding experience isn’t landing equally across work arrangements vs. those in-person or hybrid.
Seems simple, right? Yet I don’t see HR teams doing this analysis even when the data’s right there. Sometimes, it’s because their tool makes it hard to find (or doesn’t measure it), and sometimes it’s seen as a nice-to-have feature.
It’s not!
What gets measured gets improved
Remember, those treating this as a process to finish have a competitive disadvantage. Leaders survey at 30, 60, and 90 days, track where new hires stall, and look at completion rates by role, by location, by manager.
And then they act upon this data, turning a turnover possibility into retention. That’s real business impact you can measure!
And this starts with a commitment to measure how new hires feel, not just whether they completed the required steps.
If you’re ready to build sentiment measurement into your onboarding process, Click Boarding’s onboarding platform makes it possible … ask us how!
