A Quality of Hire Survey asks the hiring manager how a new hire is working out, a set number of days after that person starts. One rating out of 5, a comment box, and any questions you want to add underneath. Results are reportable by department, location, hiring manager and so on, which lets you answer the question time-to-hire never does: did the hire actually work out?
Before you start
To see survey responses you will need the View quality of hire survey responses from hiring managers permission. This can be found in Company > User Management > Permissions.
To Create & Edit Quality of Hire Surveys, you will need either the "Edit company-level settings, configure integrations and manage templates"
Or "Edit company-level settings, configure integrations and manage templates " permission.
Three things have to be true before a survey will send:
the job has a survey selected on it,
the job has a hiring manager, and
the hire has a start date on their application.
Miss any one of them and nothing goes out.
ℹ️ Switching this feature on moves your existing Candidate Surveys to sit alongside it under Settings → Templates → Surveys. Nothing is deleted, it just lives somewhere new.
How to create a survey
Step 1: Open your surveys
Go to Settings → Templates, pick the Surveys tab, then Quality of Hire. You'll see every survey you have, with its Name, Scope, number of Questions and Days after start date.
Step 2: Create the survey and set its timing
Click Create New and give the survey a Survey name. Then set Days after start date, which is how long after the hire's start date the survey goes out. Anything from 1 to 365 works, and new surveys start at 30.
The start date comes from the application, which Pinpoint keeps in sync with the offer and with onboarding.
Step 3: Write the email
Under Email Configuration, fill in the Email subject, Email message and Thank you message. Insert Variable drops in details like the new hire's name, their job title or the manager's first name, so the email doesn't read like a form letter.
Step 4: Check how the email will look
Preview Email shows what actually lands in the manager's inbox, including the Fill out survey button they'll click.
Step 5: Choose which jobs this survey is for (optional)
Under Scope Template Visibility, Add Scope limits the survey to part of your organisation, say only jobs in one location or one department. Leave it alone and the survey can be used on any job.
This is how you run a 30 day survey for Sales and a 90 day one for Engineering.
Step 6: Review the two standard questions
Every survey opens with the same two questions, and you can't remove or reword them:
How do you rate the employee's performance?, a rating out of 5, required.
Any comments on how this hire is working out?, a comment box, optional.
They're fixed on purpose. It's what lets you compare results across the whole organisation even when different teams bolt their own questions on the end.
Step 7: Add your own questions (optional)
Add New Question puts your own questions underneath the standard two. The types available are Number, Yes / No, Short Text, Long Text and Multiple Choice.
Anything you add is optional for the hiring manager. Only the rating is required.
Step 8: See it as the hiring manager will
Preview Form shows the finished survey exactly as it arrives.
Step 9: Save
Click Save Survey. It appears in the list, ready to use on a job.
How to use a survey on a job
Open the job and find the Quality of Hire Survey field. Pick the survey you want, or leave it on No survey if hires on this job shouldn't be surveyed. Only surveys scoped to that job show up in the list.
⚠️ This is the step people forget. A job with no survey selected will never send one, and there's no company-wide default to fall back on.
What happens next
Move a candidate into a hired stage and Pinpoint creates their survey.
It's scheduled for their start date plus however many days you set.
On the day, Pinpoint emails it to the hiring manager on the job.
The manager clicks Fill out survey, answers, and submits. No Pinpoint login needed.
The response then lands on the application's Quality of Hire section and in your reporting.
You get the rating as a tag, 4 / 5 for example, next to the hiring manager's name, the date they submitted, and the candidate's start date. Click through for the full response.
If the hiring manager on the job changes before the survey is due, it goes to whoever holds the job at the time it sends.
Sending a survey early, or sending a reminder
Open the application and pick Quality of Hire from its section list. Anything not yet sent is tagged Survey Scheduled.
Send to Hiring Manager sends it now, ahead of schedule. Once it's gone out, that button becomes Remind Hiring Manager, which you can use once every 24 hours.
Confirm with Send survey.
Pinpoint won't chase non-responders for you. Every reminder is one somebody on your team sends.
Seeing your results
Insights → Quality of Hire gives you:
Average quality of hire rating, the mean rating out of 5.
Survey response rate, how many managers replied as a percentage of surveys actually sent.
Responses received, the number completed.
Average ratings, a table you can group by survey, location, department, division, business unit, hiring manager or recruiter. Click any row for the individual responses.
Filters across the top cover date, department, location, job, division, business unit, recruitment manager and hiring manager.
The data turns up in two other places. Insights Hub lets you build your own pages with Quality of Hire widgets, including one that buckets ratings into Working out, Mixed and Not working out. Report Builder has a Quality of Hire report with columns for the applicant, the survey and its status, sent and submitted dates, the rating, the comment, the hiring manager, the recruiter and your organisational structure.
Tips
Thirty days is a sensible starting point. Get one survey working before you start adding department-specific ones.
Keep it short. The two standard questions take under a minute, and that's what protects your response rate. Every question you add is another reason for a busy manager to close the tab.
Check your jobs have hiring managers on them. No hiring manager, no survey.
Read the results as a trend rather than a verdict. A single 3 out of 5 tells you very little. The pattern across a department, or across a hiring channel over a few months, tells you a lot.
Read the comments, not just the ratings. That's usually where the useful detail is.
Troubleshooting
I can't see Quality of Hire Surveys at all.
Check your access group has the View quality of hire survey responses from hiring managers permission. If it does and it's still missing, the feature probably isn't switched on for your account. Ask your Customer Success contact.
A survey wasn't sent for someone we hired.
Check the job has a survey selected in its Quality of Hire Survey field, that the job has a hiring manager, and that the application has a start date. All three have to be there.
One thing that catches people out: selecting a survey on a job doesn't create surveys for people already hired on it.
The application says the survey has no send date.
The hire has no start date. Add one to the application and the survey schedules itself from there.
The Send button is greyed out.
Either the job has no hiring manager to send to, or you're trying to remind someone within 24 hours of the last reminder. Hover over the button and it'll tell you which.
We removed the survey from a job. What happens to surveys already scheduled?
Anything not yet sent is removed. Anything already sent stays put, and any responses are kept for reporting.
FAQs
Can I send the survey at 30, 60 and 90 days to the same person?
No. Each hire gets one survey, at the single timing you set. You can run different timings for different parts of the business by scoping separate surveys.
Can I survey the new hire as well as their manager?
No. These go to the hiring manager on the job, nobody else.
Will Pinpoint chase managers who don't respond?
Not on its own. Someone on your team can send a reminder from the application's Quality of Hire section, once a day.
Can I change the rating question?
No. The rating and comment questions are identical on every survey so your results stay comparable. Your own questions go beneath them.
Does the hiring manager need a Pinpoint login?
No. They get an email with a link straight to the survey.
Can a manager change their answer after submitting?
No. Once it's submitted it's final, and reopening the link just shows a thank-you message.
Can I use different surveys for different teams?
Yes. Scope each survey by location, department, division or your own structure group, then pick the right one on each job.
What happens if the hiring manager leaves before the survey is due?
It goes to whoever is the hiring manager on the job at the point it sends.
Does this track whether people stay, or import performance reviews?
No. It captures the hiring manager's view at the moment you ask. It doesn't track attrition and it doesn't connect to an HRIS or a performance system.