Quality of hire survey template

A quality of hire survey is a short, scored instrument sent to a hiring manager at fixed points after a hire starts, built specifically to feed a quality-of-hire number, not to review the new hire's progress with them or to gauge how the hiring process felt. Below are the 90-day and 12-month versions, a scoring key, and a filled example.

For the arithmetic that turns these scores into a single number, see the quality of hire formula, worked in full. For the broader measurement approach this survey fits into, see how to measure quality of hire.

What this survey measures, and what it deliberately leaves out

This survey asks a hiring manager to rate the hire's actual performance and fit against expectations, in numbers that can be aggregated across many hires. It leaves out anything about the recruiting process itself — communication, speed, candidate quality of the overall slate — because mixing process satisfaction into a performance score muddies both. If you also run a hiring manager satisfaction survey about the recruiting service, keep the two data sets separate; a manager who is frustrated with a slow process can still rate the specific hire's performance fairly, and conflating the two loses that distinction.

The 90-day survey

Quality of hire survey — 90 day
For: [hiring manager name]      About: [new hire name, role]      Sent: [date]

Rate each statement 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

1. This hire is performing at the level I expected for someone 90 days into this role.
   [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
2. This hire has picked up the skills and context needed for the role at the pace I expected.
   [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
3. I would make this same hiring decision again with what I know now.
   [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
4. This hire fits well with the team's working style.
   [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

5. What is this hire doing well? (short answer)
6. What is the one area this hire most needs to develop? (short answer)
7. Is there anything about the hiring or interview process that led to a mismatch
   between what was expected and what you are seeing now? (short answer, optional)

The 12-month follow-up survey

Quality of hire survey — 12 month
For: [hiring manager name]      About: [hire name, role]      Sent: [date]

1. This hire meets or exceeds the performance bar for this role at the one-year mark.
   [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
2. I would hire this person again, knowing what I know now.
   [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
3. This hire has grown in scope or responsibility since starting.
   [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

4. Is this hire still on your team? [Yes / No — moved internally / No — left the company]
5. If this hire is no longer on your team, what was the main reason, as far as you know?
   (short answer)

Scoring the responses

Convert each 1-5 answer to a 0-100 scale by multiplying by 20, then average the numeric questions (skip the short-answer ones) to get a manager satisfaction component. Feed that number into the quality-of-hire formula alongside performance ratings, retention and ramp time, following the worked arithmetic in the formula page. Keep the short answers as qualitative evidence attached to the score, not part of the arithmetic; they are what explain a low or high number when someone asks why.

A filled example

Handling a promotion or role change before the milestone

If a hire is promoted or moves to a different team before the 90-day or 12-month mark, send the survey to the manager who supervised them for most of that period, and note the role change directly on the response so it is not read as a straightforward like-for-like comparison against hires who stayed in their original role the whole time. A fast promotion is itself a strong quality-of-hire signal worth capturing, but folding it silently into the same scale as an ordinary 90-day rating hides the fact that something unusual happened.

Sending it: timing, who fills it out, anonymity

Send the 90-day version between day 85 and day 100, close enough to the milestone that the manager's answers reflect a specific, recent period rather than a vague overall impression built up over months. Send the 12-month version around the anniversary date. The hiring manager fills it out, not the new hire and not HR on the manager's behalf. Do not make it anonymous: the score is tied to a specific hire and a specific manager by design, and anonymity would make it impossible to follow up on a concerning short answer or to check for a manager who rates everyone the same regardless of performance.

Reading responses across managers

Before comparing scores across different managers' hires, check whether any manager's ratings cluster unusually high or low across all their responses, independent of the individual hires. A manager who rates every hire a 5 is giving you less signal than one whose ratings vary with actual performance, even though both sets of numbers look equally clean in a spreadsheet. This does not mean discarding that manager's data, but it is worth normalizing for when comparing scores across a whole team or department rather than treating every manager's 4 as equivalent.

Adding a peer or skip-level version

A manager's rating is the core input, but a second perspective helps catch a manager whose judgment on this particular hire may be shaped by something other than performance, such as a personality clash or a difficult team dynamic that predates the new hire. A short peer version can use the same four rating questions from the 90-day survey, sent to one or two people who work closely with the hire but do not manage them. Do not average peer and manager scores together into one number; keep them as separate columns so a gap between the two is itself a signal worth a conversation, not something the arithmetic quietly erases.

What to do with a low score

A single low score is a prompt to look closer, not a verdict. Read the short answers first: a low numeric score paired with a specific, fixable development area ("needs to speak up more in meetings") points toward coaching. A low score paired with a vague or missing short answer is worth a direct conversation with the manager, since it may reflect a mismatch between what was promised in the interview and what the role turned out to require, which is a hiring process finding as much as a performance one. Track how often that pattern shows up across a role family; a single low score is noise, but three low scores on the same role with the same complaint is a signal about the job posting or the interview loop, not about three unrelated hires.

Common mistakes

The most common mistake is combining this survey with a hiring manager satisfaction survey into one form, on the theory that it saves the manager time. A close second is sending both surveys from the same email thread or the same form link, which produces the same blending effect even when the questions themselves are kept separate; a manager annoyed about a slow hiring process will let that frustration color performance ratings sitting right next to it on the same page. It saves a few minutes and costs the ability to tell whether a low score reflects the hire or the process, which is the entire reason to run two separate instruments. A second mistake is sending the survey so long after the 90-day mark that the manager is rating a fuzzy, months-old impression rather than something recent and specific; a two-week send window around the actual milestone keeps the answers grounded. A third is skipping the 12-month follow-up because the 90-day number already exists; a hire who looked strong at 90 days and left or stalled by month ten changes the picture in a way the 90-day score alone will never show.

Store every response, including the short answers, in the same place you keep the rest of the hire's quality-of-hire data, so a year from now the qualitative context is still attached to the number rather than living only in an old email that is hard to find again.

A spreadsheet with one row per hire, one column per survey question, and a final column for the computed score works fine for most teams and does not require a dedicated tool to maintain.