What this is
Sixteen check-in questions for a new hire's first ninety days, built on the three mechanisms the onboarding research finds carry retention: role clarity, self-efficacy and social acceptance. Use the set once at ninety days, or split it across days thirty, sixty and ninety. Each question names what it probes and the finding it rests on.
What the evidence does and does not support
Onboarding carries the strongest evidence on this site, and our review still grades it mixed. There is one randomized field experiment that measured whether people actually quit: 605 new hires at a business-process outsourcer, where those given an onboarding built around their own strengths were more than 32% less likely to leave within six months than those given the standard process. It is one firm, in a labour market losing half to two thirds of its people a year, and it tested a specific design, not onboarding in general.
The wider literature agrees more weakly and points at the mechanism. A meta-analysis of seventy newcomer samples found socialization related to staying, working through role clarity, self-efficacy and social acceptance. It is observational, so it establishes an association and a mechanism, not a cause. And in the one-company case study in our research library, new joiners were more inclined to leave than anyone else.
So this set checks the three mechanisms directly, plus the manager and the gap between the job described and the job found. Read the grade for the boundary, and do not quote the 32% as what you will get.
How to run it
- The manager asks, with one exception. The manager relationship is the heaviest factor in the diagnostic. If the manager questions in this set draw a blank, have someone else ask them once.
- Ask about the process while it is fresh. The question about what to change for the next person is the one that improves the thing you can actually change before the next hire.
- Measure your own first-six-month leaving rate. Before and after. You will be the second data point in a literature that currently has one.
A preview of the set
The first 2 questions of each section. 3 more, the reading guide, and the PDF are behind the gate below.
Role clarity
The first of the three mechanisms, and the cheapest to fix.
Can you describe what a good week looks like in this job, in your own words?
Is there a part of the job you are still unsure is yours?
+ 1 more in the full set
Self-efficacy
The second mechanism, and the one the field experiment on this site points at.
What have you done here so far that you are confident you did well?
What are you still avoiding because you are not sure how it is done here?
+ 1 more in the full set
Social acceptance
The third mechanism. Belonging is built one introduction at a time.
Who do you go to when you are stuck, and how did you find them?
Is there anyone you have not met yet who you think you should have?
+ 1 more in the full set
The manager
The heaviest factor in the diagnostic, and a relationship that is still forming.
How often do you and your manager talk, and is it about the right things?
Has anyone told you how you are doing, in a way you could act on?
Workload and flexibility
Two expectations set at hiring that are worth checking against reality.
Has the workload been what you expected, and is it sustainable?
Does the way we set where and when you work match what you were told when you accepted?
The process, and the signals
The one thing you can change before the next hire, and one signal worth asking about.
Is there anything about how you were brought in that you would change for the next person?
Have any of the people who started with you or around you already left?
Close
One question with a scale in it, so the answer can be compared at thirty, sixty and ninety days.
Between 'I can see myself here in two years' and 'I am already looking', where are you today, and what moves it?
Sources
- Newcomer Adjustment During Organizational Socialization: A Meta-Analytic Review of Antecedents, Outcomes, and Methods — Bauer, Bodner, Erdogan, Truxillo and Tucker, Journal of Applied Psychology 92(3), 707-721, peer reviewed
- Breaking Them In or Eliciting Their Best? Reframing Socialization around Newcomers' Authentic Self-Expression — Cable, Gino and Staats, Administrative Science Quarterly 58(1), peer reviewed. Read via the authors' own account in MIT Sloan Management Review 54(3)
- Employee turnover prediction and retention policies design: a case study — Ribes, Touahri and Perthame (2017), preprint
- Gallup — How to Improve Employee Engagement in the Workplace — Gallup
- Gallup — Why Great Managers Are So Rare — Gallup
- Gallup — Employee Burnout, Part 1: The 5 Main Causes — Gallup
- The Future of the Office Has Arrived: It's Hybrid — Gallup, October 2023. Gallup Panel survey of 18,871 U.S. workers, May 11 to 25, 2023; a survey of stated intentions, not measured turnover
- SHRM — Onboarding Key to Retaining, Engaging Talent — SHRM
- Network Contagion in Financial Labor Markets: Predicting Turnover in Hong Kong — AlKetbi et al. (2025), preprint
- How to make them stay? Diverse Counterfactual Explanations of Attrition — Artelt and Gregoriades (2023), conference paper