Employee Retention Strategies: Ready to Use Questionnaire

Employee retention is no longer a fuzzy HR metric. It’s a direct reflection of your hiring quality, onboarding effectiveness, and the daily work culture you foster. In an economy where top talent is scarce and competitors are always hiring, retaining employees isn’t just nice to have. It’s critical to survival.

If you're seeing early exits, disengaged employees, or rising attrition numbers, you're not alone. But the solution isn’t always more salary, more perks, or more training.

Sometimes, the best starting point is the simplest one: asking the right questions.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through a ready-to-use questionnaire that helps identify the gaps in your retention strategy. Whether you’re a TA head, CHRO, or business leader, this questionnaire acts as your mirror—giving you real, actionable signals about what’s working and what’s not.

We’ll also show you how RippleHire, the high-performance ATS, can help you operationalize your retention strategy at scale.

Why You Need a Retention Strategy Audit

Before you fix the problem, you need to understand it.

Here’s the thing: most retention issues are invisible until they blow up. They start small—an unchecked mismatch in expectations, an unclear career path, a hiring decision made in haste—and spiral into burnout, low performance, and exits.

A questionnaire built around employee lifecycle checkpoints helps you:

• Catch patterns early

• Understand if the problem lies in hiring, onboarding, culture, or manager behavior

• Create interventions that actually work (instead of just being HR-led optics)

So let’s get to the questionnaire.

The Retention Strategy Questionnaire

We’ve divided the questions into 5 key categories:

1. Hiring and Expectations

2. Onboarding Experience

3. Manager Effectiveness

4. Career Growth and Internal Mobility

5. Recognition, Culture, and Exit Feedback

Each section has a few powerful questions that your HR and leadership team should answer honestly. You can turn this into a survey, use it during leadership offsites, or review it quarterly.

Section 1: Hiring and Expectations

If retention is a fire, poor hiring is often the match.

• Are we hiring based on performance potential or just paper credentials?

• How often do our new hires churn within the first 90 days?

• Do hiring managers set realistic expectations during interviews?

• Are recruiters under pressure to fill fast, rather than fill right?

• Do we rehire candidates who’ve exited within a short span?

Read more about hiring mistakes to avoid

Section 2: Onboarding Experience

A strong start defines long-term engagement.

• Do new hires get a structured onboarding plan for their first 30–60–90 days?

• Is the hiring manager actively involved in onboarding or is it dumped on HR?

• Do employees understand how their role connects to company goals?

• Are we using the first 7 days to build relationships, not just complete paperwork?

If you're relying on manual onboarding emails and manager memory to drive induction, you're creating invisible friction. A high-performance ATS like RippleHire automates onboarding workflows, tracks task completion, and offers dashboards to managers so that nothing slips through.

Section 3: Manager Effectiveness

People don’t leave companies. They leave managers.

• Are our managers trained to lead people or just manage performance?

• How often are one-on-ones happening—and what do they cover?

• Are managers measured on team engagement and not just deliverables?

• Do managers have a say in final hiring decisions, or are they just handed a new joiner?

If you answered “no” to most of these, the problem isn’t people—it’s management design.

Section 4: Career Growth and Internal Mobility

Retention doesn’t mean locking people in. It means helping them grow.

• Can employees see a clear growth path within the organization?

• Are we enabling lateral movement across functions, geographies, or business units?

• Do internal job postings (IJPs) get enough visibility?

• Are employees considered for new roles before the company looks outside?

A good ATS should track skill match, internal interest, and past performance to recommend roles. RippleHire’s internal mobility module is designed to help you retain top talent within the ecosystem—not lose them to competitors.

Section 5: Recognition, Culture, and Exit Feedback

Culture is what people say about your company when HR isn’t in the room.

• Do we have a regular cadence of recognition beyond appraisals?

• Are there mechanisms to raise grievances or give feedback without fear?

• Is exit feedback collected systematically—and acted upon?

• Do we know why our best people leave?

Most companies collect feedback during exits. Great companies use it to improve hiring, onboarding, and engagement. Your ATS should integrate with feedback systems to capture exit signals and loop them into your TA dashboards.

Scoring Your Answers

You don’t need a fancy system to get started. A simple color-coded score can work:

• Green: Yes, we’re doing this well

• Yellow: Somewhat, but needs improvement

• Red: Not at all

If most of your answers fall in the red or yellow zone, it’s time to step back and ask: Are we building an organization where people want to stay?

Using RippleHire to Improve Retention

Retention is not an isolated metric. It’s the outcome of hundreds of moments across the hiring journey—many of which can be designed better.

RippleHire helps you:

• Hire right with structured JD-to-interview workflows

• Set expectations with video-based job previews and offer alignment tools

• Automate onboarding tasks and manager accountability

• Track mobility readiness, referral insights, and retention-linked dashboards

• Use referral programs to hire culturally aligned, long-term candidates

Want to see how this works in your setup?

Book a Demo and see how RippleHire powers your employee lifecycle with retention-first workflows.

Wrapping Up

Great retention is not a happy accident. It’s an outcome of consistent decisions made across hiring, onboarding, management, and growth.

This questionnaire is not a checklist to be completed once. It’s a framework to review every quarter so that you stay aligned with your people and their expectations.

And if you’re looking for a system that’s built to support this kind of intentional hiring and retention—RippleHire is ready when you are.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q1. Why is employee retention important in 2025?
Employee retention drives productivity, reduces rehiring costs, and reflects organizational health. In 2025, with talent mobility at an all-time high, strong retention practices can give companies a major competitive edge.

Q2. How can a questionnaire help improve retention?
A well-structured questionnaire reveals bottlenecks in hiring, onboarding, and engagement that are often missed. It creates visibility and helps prioritize interventions.

Q3. What are the top reasons employees leave early?
Poor expectation setting, weak onboarding, mismatched roles, and bad manager relationships are common reasons for early attrition.

Q4. Can RippleHire help with retention?
Yes. RippleHire offers hiring, onboarding, internal mobility, and referral solutions that are designed to reduce early attrition and improve long-term employee engagement.

Q5. How often should we run the retention questionnaire?
Ideally, once every quarter or at least bi-annually to keep your retention strategies updated and relevant.