How to run employee onboarding with Typeform

Whether you’re a distributed or remote-first company, or you’re running global operations, Typeform can be a great tool for onboarding your new employees, and providing them with a more personalized online experience.

You can use Typeform for things like new hire welcome forms, equipment or software preference forms, culture-fit and value alignment quizzes, training forms, or first week feedback forms during your employee onboarding process.

In this example, we’ll cover an end-to-end use case, where you’ll get the chance to introduce your company and get a little intro from your newbies as well.Then quiz them on some fun facts they’ve learned about your company, and complete any outstanding issues, like getting their work tools sorted. Employees can then share some feedback about their onboarding experience.

Here’s a list of the most important Typeform features we’ll be using:

Let’s get to it!

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Form A - Introduction and new hire welcome form

This is where we’re introducing our company to new joiners. It’s extremely important that they feel connected, so we’re adding videos to make the experience more personalized, letting newbies put a face to some of the names at the company.

Here’s how we’ve built it:

Create a new form or open up an existing one, and add some Statements with video questions. Here you can upload a video of someone on the leadership team talking about the mission and vision of your company. With Statements, your respondents don't have to answer or enter a response. They can just watch the video and move on to the next question in your form.

Tip: You could even ask your current employees to record a video of themselves talking about your company values. If you have a Video and Audio answer option in your form, this could encourage your new employees to also respond with video.

Now that you’ve led by example, you can ask your new employees to record a video answer introducing themselves. To do this, you can add a Video and Audio answer by clicking + Add content, or you can change one of your Statements by selecting Video and Audio in the Answer dropdown. We’ll make the video answer optional to give people who might be a bit camera shy the chance to respond in text instead of video by toggling the Allow text answer switch.

Tip: Once you’ve collected some intro video answers from the newbies, you can download them in the Results panel under Responses. You can then add these introductory videos to another form, and share that form with the company or a relevant department or team.

Next, let’s add some Yes/No questions to our form. First, we’ll ask people if they’ve ordered their newbie welcome pack yet. This could include some swag or their hardware and software preferences.

Optionally, you can also quiz them a little while their memory is fresh. This can be another Yes/No question with something like, “Are you ready to test your knowledge?”. Then you can redirect employees to the quiz form.

Next, we’ll add our Endings and redirects. There’s a redirect link for the order form, and another one for the value alignment quiz. These will include the form URLs, and a URL label to make them easy to identify when we add our branching logic.

Finally, we can include a redirect on Ending to a feedback form about the onboarding process. The feedback form is optional, so here we’ll just be using a hyperlink on the button instead of redirecting people based on their answer. We’ll customize the Button text and toggle the Button link switch on to add our form URL there.

Then we’ll determine which Ending or redirect link people will see depending on their answers using some Branching logic in the Workflow panel. Click Workflow and then click Branching.

If they say yes to question 2, we can move on to the next question, but if they say no, we’ll redirect them to the order form or the quiz. Click Save when you’re done with setting up your rules and conditions.

Tip: You can also add a Multiple Choice question as the last question of your intro form, asking "What would you like to do next?". Then list the names of the other forms as your choices, and create redirects to each form adding logic to the correct redirect. You can then have the same "What would you like to do next?” question in your other forms, letting people choose what they want to do next in each form.

Form B - Contact and swag/equipment order form

This is a basic order form, where you can confirm your new employee’s contact information and address, ask them about their t-shirt size, or find out what their favorite cake is.

Let’s get started with a Welcome Screen.

Next, we’ll confirm people’s contact information. Here, we’ll just be asking some Short Text questions for their name, and a Multiple Choice question about their department. Knowing this is pretty important, so we’ll make the question required.

Tip: To capture information like your respondent’s name, email, and phone number, you could also use the Contact Info question type.

Then we’ll ask where they live with an Address question. In this question we’ve also used Recall information from a previous answer to call our respondents by their name to make it feel more personal.

And now, a seemingly off-topic question about your newbie’s favorite cake. Of course, it’s not even that off-topic if you want to send people a cake on their birthday ;)

Finally, we’ll add a Multiple Choice question asking people about their T-shirt size.

Tip: To make sure they get their size right, you can also add a link to a sizing chart in the description field.

After thanking your new employees for submitting their order, you can also remind them of your culture fit quiz by adding a link to it on your Ending screen.

That’s all. You’ve confirmed your new hire’s contact information and collected everything you need to send your newbies some swag. You can use a similar form for equipment or software preferences as well, just make sure to have people’s delivery address confirmed if you’re planning to send them their chosen equipment.

Form C - Culture fit and value alignment quiz

This is just a fun quiz where you can ask questions about the history and values of your company, and you can also sprinkle it with fun questions about your CEO’s favorite fruit or the name of the office dog.

Add some Multiple Choice or Picture Choice questions to your form.

Click the dropdown arrow next to the default Universal mode, and switch to Knowledge quiz mode.

Click Set correct answers.

Now you can select the correct answers by selecting the checkboxes and assign a score to each answer by entering a numeric value in the Score field. Click Save when you’re done.

Once you’ve set your correct answers, you can click the Form settings (gear) icon in the Content panel to get to your Knowledge quiz settings.

Here you can toggle the Show correct answers and feedback and Customize answer feedback switches to show people the correct and incorrect answers after each question, and to customize the answer feedback your respondents will see. Type the message you want to show your respondents after correct and incorrect answers in the respective fields, and click Save when you’re done

While this example was on the lighter side, Knowledge quiz mode is great for more serious training assessment use cases because people won’t be able to change the answer they’ve selected after finding out whether it was correct or not. Find out everything about Knowledge quiz mode here.

Form D - Onboarding feedback form

This is a classic feedback form that lets you gather information from your new employees about the onboarding process itself.

Add a Welcome Screen to let people know what the form is all about.

Add a Multiple Choice question asking about how long they’ve been at the company.

At this point, you can also add some Branching logic to show the most relevant questions depending on which stage of the onboarding process they’re at.

For example, people who have only been at the company for less than a week will be asked about the recruitment process, while people who’ve been at the company for a few weeks will be asked about the tools they’re received.

Then, add a Rating question to ask about your new employee’s overall onboarding experience. You can also customize the rating scale and the icons used for rating here.

Finally, you can add an open-ended Short Text or Long Text question asking people if there’s anything you could improve about their onboarding experience.

Tip: Using branching logic will let you share the same onboarding feedback form with your new employees throughout their onboarding process. For example, you might have an email you send to employees a week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months after they’ve joined. If you set Branching rules on the “How long have you been with us?” question, people will only see the follow-up questions relevant to them after answering this first question.

Apply branding to your forms

The on-brand designs you’ve seen in our onboarding forms were created using brand kits. You can apply these design elements to all of your forms within your account, and you can even enforce the use of brand kits for everyone in your organization.

You can also create a theme for your form to change colors, fonts, and add your logo on plans that don’t include brand kits. Using a brand kit is the best option when you have multiple people in your organization, and you want everyone in your organization to use the same brand assets.

In this example, we have different brand kits created for our brand, and we can switch between them in one simple click in the Design tab of your forms.

To view or add new assets to your brand kits, click Manage next to Brand kit themes.

Now you’ll see all the existing brand kits in your account. Click + New brand kit to create a new one or click on a brand kit to view its details.

Here, you can customize your brand kits under the Branding and Themes tabs. Under the Branding tab, you can add brand assets, like logos, fonts, colors, and media.

For example, you can create a new media collection by adding images that match your brand.

Next, under the Themes tab, you can create a theme with the assets you’ve added in your brand kit. Click a theme to open up its details.

Now you’ll see the fonts, colors, background images, and logos used in your brand kit. You can also switch between desktop and mobile view to check what your brand design will look like on different devices.

You need to be an account owner or administrator to create new brand kit themes.

Now that you’ve covered various aspects of your onboarding process with different forms, it’s time to share them with the world, in this case, your company. You can simply share a link to each form, launch them from an email, or embed them on a website, for example, your landing page.