Organizations thrive when they find top talent, help them become their best selves, and keep them around for as long as possible. That’s the employee lifecycle in a nutshell: the cycle from attraction to recruitment, onboarding to growth, retention to eventual separation. Because your employees are your most important resource, knowing exactly what happens at each stage of that lifecycle—and what you can do to improve it—is vital. Employee lifecycle surveys give you the information you need to do that.
Lifecycle surveys are doled out at different stages in an employee’s journey and give you essential data for improving them. They’re known by different names throughout that journey, such as stay interviews or onboarding surveys.
These surveys are robust and need equally robust tools, like 15Five, which centralizes the data from these surveys and guides you through best practices.
In this guide, you’ll learn about these essential surveys, as well as how 15Five can make them even more powerful.
Key Takeaways:
- Employee lifecycle surveys give organizations valuable insight into every stage of the employee journey, from recruitment to exit.
- These surveys are essential to employee lifecycle management, helping HR teams refine strategies for engagement and retention.
- Companies that consistently use surveys across the employee lifecycle phases improve both employee retention and overall engagement.
- A strong employee retention strategy is built on listening to employees and acting on feedback gathered through surveys.
- Tools like 15Five Engage streamline survey delivery and analysis, empowering HR leaders to strengthen the lifecycle of an employee with data-driven insights.
Understanding the employee lifecycle
The employee lifecycle covers the stages of an employee’s tenure with your organization. These stages are:
Attraction
This is the time before an employee joins your organization, and before they’re even a candidate. At this stage, they’re finding your job listing and potentially interacting with recruiters and managers. Organizations need to draft compelling job postings and list them in the right place so potential candidates both find them and get excited about the opportunity.
Recruitment
The actual hiring process, in which a potential employee will go through phone screens, sit in interviews, and maybe even participate in pilot projects or other tests. Your hiring process can have a significant impact on employee engagement, especially if candidates have to go through multiple interviews.
Onboarding
The 30 to 90-day period when a new employee learns the expectations that come with their role, the processes their team uses, and how to be the best collaborator they can. Since 30% of new hires leave within the first 90 days, employee engagement is high stakes at this stage.
Development
At this stage, an employee has completed their onboarding, and you draft potential paths for their growth within your organization. This stage includes training sessions, mentorship, and regular performance reviews.
Retention
Employee retention includes the initiatives and strategies you use to keep employees at your organization as long as you can. This is typically after they’ve reached a certain tenure and have become invaluable contributors to your mission.
Separation
Parting ways with an employee can be difficult, but it’s a common part of the employee lifecycle. Even if an employee is leaving, you still can influence their experience by making the separation as smooth and painless as possible.
What are employee lifecycle surveys?
Employee lifecycle survey is an umbrella term that includes a number of surveys aimed at improving employee engagement and retention at different stages of an employee's tenure. This includes:
- Candidate surveys: These surveys allow organizations to get feedback on their hiring process, both from successful and unsuccessful candidates. This creates insights into the best ways to advertise job postings, how to craft more compelling postings, and how to streamline the recruitment process.
- Onboarding surveys: Your onboarding process is essential to your employee retention strategy, and these surveys give you visibility into that process. These surveys can confirm that employees get all the information and access they need when needed, that the onboarding process is the right length, and more.
- Training feedback surveys: Training sessions aren’t just needed when employees are being onboarded. They’re used throughout an employee’s growth. Feedback surveys sent after an important training session can ensure these sessions actually do what they’re meant to.
- Performance reviews: Regular performance reviews don’t just help managers guide employees towards performing their best work. They’re also an essential touchpoint for gauging the strength of the employee experience, employee engagement, and even role clarity.
- 360 reviews: Where performance reviews align managers and employees on performance and expectations, 360 reviews allow employees to reflect on their own performance and that of their peers. When collected, this data can give you a strong impression of how employees see their roles and their objectives.
- Engagement surveys: Employee engagement surveys are essential for tracking how motivated and driven employees are throughout their tenure. They can be used throughout the employee lifecycle, allowing you to measure trends over time and spot problem areas in your employee experience.
- Stay interviews: A stay interview is a proactive initiative HR teams take to understand why certain employees stay with their company. They’re often done with employees who might be looking for their next opportunity, but they’re a useful tool in all situations.
- Exit surveys: When employees do leave your organization, exit surveys allow you to know if their departure was preventable. You can also learn what might be done to prevent future cases of employee turnover.
These surveys serve as touchpoints throughout an employee’s tenure, ensuring organizations are consistently listening to employees so they’re aware of trends, challenges, and potential risks. This allows organizations to build stronger processes and support systems for employees at every stage of their growth.
Benefits of using employee lifecycle surveys
Using the right surveys at the right stage of the employee lifecycle gives you the information you need to retain employees, keep them engaged, and even attract better candidates. Here’s why.
Better recruiting
When you use regular surveys to get feedback from candidates about your recruiting process, you can eliminate redundancies (like that third interview), get better at finding the right fit earlier, and understand what top talent needs out of your recruiting process.
Stronger employee engagement
It’s hard to know how motivated and driven employees are if you don’t ask them. And while the data from employee engagement surveys can guide the initiatives you pursue to improve engagement, just the fact that you’re asking these questions also goes a long way.
Smoother onboarding
With onboarding surveys, you can improve your process so you lose fewer employees in the first few months of their tenure.
Reduced turnover
Employee turnover can happen for many reasons, but the right surveys can prevent it from being a surprise. Everything from engagement surveys to stay interviews can help you identify the signs of potential turnover and know what you need to do to change things.
Stronger employer brand
Your brand as an employer depends on what your employees, both former and current, think and say. Employee lifecycle surveys allow you to discover these, as well as share them strategically.
How to implement employee lifecycle surveys effectively
Design strong surveys
What questions you ask is just as important as how many you ask. Don’t just pick a template and stick with it. Make sure you vary the type of questions you ask (e.g., multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank) and ask enough questions to get a complete picture of what you’re evaluating without overwhelming employees.
Time your surveys appropriately
You need to deploy the right surveys at the right stage of the employee lifecycle, but they also need to come at the correct cadence. Performance reviews, for example, usually happen every quarter throughout an employee’s tenure.
Offer anonymity
The best way to get feedback you can really use is to offer anonymity as an option. That way, employees can speak honestly and transparently, which gives you better visibility into potential engagement or retention issues.
Use the right tools
While you might be tempted to use a Google Form or a spreadsheet to capture a few answers for a short survey, they don’t really cut it for employee lifecycle surveys. Dedicated performance management tools like 15Five don’t just make the survey process easier; they also let you do more with the data you get.
Use data in a broader strategy
The feedback you get in employee lifecycle surveys shouldn’t just stay in those surveys. They can (and should) be used in border employee engagement, retention, and recruitment initiatives.
Practical applications: Using surveys across each phase
Here are a few practical examples showing how using the right surveys at the right phase of the employee lifecycle can completely transform your organization.
Attraction and recruitment
Candidate surveys allow you to get more visibility into your recruitment process. You might discover that you’re running too many interviews, that you’re accidentally filtering out qualified candidates with your pilot projects, or even just that you’re not advertising open roles in the right place.
Onboarding
Surveys taken during and after your onboarding process can help you identify gaps in the training you’re offering, delays in getting employees what they need to do their work, and even insight into whether your process is the right length.
Development
As employees grow within your organization, performance reviews, 360 reviews, and other surveys allow you to get a more complete picture of their experience at every level. This can unlock new growth opportunities, improve alignment between employees and managers, and highlight where managers might need support.
Retention
Employee engagement surveys and stay interviews reveal engagement trends, which are essential to retaining your top talent. Identify issues before they spiral into larger problems, track the impact of your employee engagement initiatives, and find out who’s the most engaged in your workforce.
Separation
Exit surveys give you the data you need to know how you can retain more employees longer. What you learn in these surveys can help you uncover the root causes of turnover at your organization and roll out initiatives to address them.
Building a data-driven employee retention strategy
The data from your employee lifecycle surveys can lead to a stronger employee retention strategy, but only if it’s used the right way.
Assign ownership of lifecycle data
To make sure employee lifecycle data is actually used, someone needs to own that process. It can be someone in your HR team, several people on that team, or even a data analyst working with HR. Just make sure everyone’s clear on who that role belongs to.
Connect insights with performance metrics
Insights from employee lifecycle surveys can easily be tied to employee retention metrics like:
- Turnover rate
- Employee engagement
- Average employee tenure
- Hire satisfaction
For example, exit surveys might reveal high turnover among employees with shorter average tenure, which signals potential issues with your onboarding process or the employee experience at the junior level.
Turn insights and metrics into strategy
When you have a clear process for turning survey answers into data and data into metrics, you’ll have a roadmap for your retention strategy. Low average tenure with employees who leave? Then you know you need to target junior employees. Decreased engagement after promotions? Maybe you need to improve role clarity throughout the organization.
Why use 15Five Engage for Employee lifecycle surveys
There’s no shortage of tools out there for running surveys, collecting data, and turning insights into initiatives. But would you rather assemble a patchwork of tools or rely on a single platform?
That’s where 15Five’s employee engagement software comes in. Run engagement surveys, tie important metrics to other initiatives, and put data at the fingertips of anyone who needs it, from stakeholders to managers and HR.
When you use 15Five, you’ll:
- Have a single source of truth for employee engagement and retention data.
- Get access to best practices and templates for all your employee lifecycle surveys.
- Have a platform for supporting and training managers in addressing employee engagement issues.
- And more.
Want to see how 15Five can transform the way you support employees throughout their tenure? Learn more about 15Five here.
Know what to do and when to do it
The employee lifecycle is full of challenges, from initial recruitment to offboarding. Without insight into these challenges, it’s harder for HR teams to know where they can have the most impact. That’s why employee lifecycle surveys are so essential; they’re windows into every phase of that lifecycle, guiding HR in solving tenacious engagement and retention problems.
Modern employee engagement tools like 15Five turn these surveys into data points in a constellation of action. They give you clear steps to follow for getting the visibility you need and an action plan based on what you learn.
See how 15Five can transform your employee lifecycle management. Book a demo.
