Fake Answers in New Hire Surveys

New hire surveys are becoming more common these days, because they bring about a variety of benefits for companies looking to better understand their employees. But new hire surveys also suffer from one very obvious problem – these individuals just now got their job and want to start off on the right foot, so they may be far less likely to answer their surveys honestly and in a way that helps you receive interesting and valuable data. To help you solve this problem, here are several possible ways you can receive better answers from these surveys.

Rate Answers Many companies have started to switch to rating systems, that require the respondent to rate items from most to least (or first to last, etc.), rather than give them a numeric answer. This forces employees to make decisions about what fails to measure up to something else that was offered by the company, and thus allows you to get comparative rankings to help make decisions. Some people worry about ranked answers because if there was an ideal “perfect” hiring practice, you may be making business decisions based on what ranks lowest, despite the lowest ranking being just as valuable to and appreciated by the new employees.

But in this same ideal scenario, the rankings wouldn’t have a “best” because everything would be considered the best, and the data should show that everything is about equal. You can also compare this to the overall satisfaction scores or other questions you ask that don’t have a ranking and you should be able to avoid making bad business decisions. Open Ended Answers Another option is to put open ended questions in the survey.

On the one hand, open ended questions are not always likely to get good responses, because employees do not want to make it known that they have problems (especially not in their first week of work). On the other hand, you can often learn a great deal from open ended answers that may not have been possible with closed questions. If there is an area of improvement that your company can look into that you may not have thought about yet, most likely that will be included in the open ended answer.

We’ll continue this discussion of ways to reduce problems with responses in the next article, and provide a conclusion of final thoughts.