Describe who you are welcoming and what the next stage requires. Makeform turns your brief into an onboarding questionnaire that gathers practical details, working preferences, goals, access needs, and open questions before the first meeting or first day.
Route onboarding answers to Slack, Google Sheets, and Zapier.
Sample prompts for the builder
Choose a starting point, tailor the prompt, or send it to the Makeform builder. The question structure shown here is an example you can edit.
Prompt ready4 formats
Audience
HR teams welcoming employees before their first day
Format
Preboarding questionnaire with role and setup details
Prompt size
483 chars
Brief qualitySends to builder
Example questionnaire structure
Preboarding questionnaire with role and setup details
Prompt exampleEditable in builder
Preferred name, pronunciation, and contact details
Short answerFirst ask
2
Role, manager, start date, and work location
Short answer
3
Which equipment or system access do you need?
Checkboxes
4
How do you prefer to receive feedback?
Long answer
5
What would make your first week successful?
Long answer
Suggested routing tags
Suggested
Ready to start
Needs follow-up
Access required
Ask only for information someone can act on during onboarding. A question about preferred feedback is useful when the manager sees the answer before the first one-to-one.
Step 1
Define
audience, milestone, and decisions
Step 2
Ask
details, goals, preferences, and needs
Step 3
Route
answers to the people who can act
Step 4
Welcome
start informed, prepared, and personal
A better first step
Turn onboarding questions into useful preparation.
A good onboarding questionnaire does more than collect a bio. It gives HR, a manager, or a coach enough structured context to prepare access, shape the first conversation, and follow up on the details that could otherwise slow the start.
Collect the essentials once
Gather contact details, role or engagement context, dates, logistics, and preferences in a single response. The recipient does not have to answer the same setup questions across an email thread, chat, and kickoff call.
Branch for different needs
Show remote-work setup questions only to remote employees, or project-access questions only to clients who use a particular platform. Conditional follow-ups keep the main questionnaire focused without losing important detail.
Make every answer actionable
Separate information for the welcome conversation from requests that need ownership. Equipment, account access, scheduling constraints, and open questions can be tagged and routed to the team member responsible for the next step.
Choose your onboarding moment
One questionnaire pattern, four distinct welcomes.
The useful questions change with the relationship. Start with the audience and the decision the answers need to support, then remove anything nobody will use.
Employee preboarding
Prepare equipment, permissions, workplace details, introductions, and a first-week plan before a new employee arrives. Keep optional identity and accommodation questions clearly marked and restrict sensitive answers to the appropriate team.
Coaching intake
Learn why the client is starting, what they want to change, what they have already tried, and how they prefer to work. The first session can begin with priorities instead of spending half the time on background.
Client kickoff
Map objectives, stakeholders, approval paths, assets, milestones, and communication expectations. The project team gets a shared starting brief while the kickoff call focuses on unclear or strategic issues.
Remote team setup
Collect time zones, working windows, equipment, account requests, and channel preferences. Use the answers to design an intentional first week for someone who cannot solve setup questions by walking over to a desk.
Build the questionnaire
From a short brief to a ready onboarding flow.
Give the generator the context behind your welcome process, then review the result as the person who must complete it and the person who must act on it.
State whether the questionnaire is for an employee, coaching client, agency client, volunteer, or another audience. Include when it will be sent and what should be ready after the response arrives.
02
Shape sections and follow-ups
Group questions into basics, goals, logistics, ways of working, and open questions. Add branching where an answer creates a genuine follow-up, such as requesting details only when someone selects new equipment.
03
Review tone, privacy, and effort
Make optional questions visible, explain why sensitive details are requested, and remove fields that do not support a specific onboarding action. Preview the form on a phone and check that long answers are reserved for topics worth reflecting on.
04
Share early and prepare the welcome
Send the link with a clear due date and time estimate. Review responses before the first day or meeting, assign access and logistics requests, and bring unresolved questions into the live conversation.
Questionnaire vs email vs generic template
Choose a collection method that supports the next action.
Onboarding information is easiest to use when each answer has a predictable place, optional paths stay relevant, and the team can review one complete response before the welcome begins.
Approach
What happens
Best fit
ApproachUnstructured email
What happensThe recipient answers in prose, skips a few prompts, and starts a thread whenever clarification is needed.
Best fitA short, personal introduction with only two or three simple questions.
ApproachGeneric document template
What happensYou get a question list, but still need to tailor, distribute, collect, and reorganize the answers for the team.
Best fitBrainstorming topics before you know the exact workflow or audience.
Approach
Generated online questionnaire
What happensQuestions reflect the role or engagement, branching reveals relevant follow-ups, and every response arrives in the same structure.
Best fitRepeatable employee or client onboarding that involves preparation, routing, and a live kickoff.
Field guide
What an onboarding questionnaire should include.
Use these six sections as a practical review list. The strongest questionnaire is not the longest one; it collects enough context to personalize the welcome, complete setup, and make the first conversation more useful.
Identity and context
Start with the details that prevent confusion.
Ask for the person's preferred name, contact method, role or engagement, relevant organization, manager or primary contact, start date, and location. For employees, pronunciation and pronouns can be optional. For clients, include the project or service they are beginning so responses remain understandable when several engagements start at once.
Preferred name, contact information, and optional pronunciation.
Role, project, program, manager, coach, or account owner.
Start date, first meeting date, location, and time zone.
Goals and success
Learn what a good beginning should accomplish.
Move beyond broad prompts such as asking for expectations. Give respondents a useful horizon and invite observable outcomes: what should feel clearer after 30 days, what should the kickoff decide, or what change would make coaching worthwhile? Their language gives the manager or coach a better starting point for aligning priorities.
Reason for starting now and the most important near-term outcome.
Personal definition of progress or a successful first phase.
Questions, concerns, and assumptions to clarify together.
Setup and logistics
Surface requests before they become first-day blockers.
Collect equipment, accounts, workspace, scheduling, travel, delivery, or meeting requirements while there is still time to prepare them. Checkboxes make standard choices easy to route; an adjacent detail field handles unusual needs. Never collect passwords in an onboarding questionnaire, and explain how access will be granted separately.
Equipment, software, permissions, files, and workspace needs.
Working hours, time zone, shipping, meeting, or session logistics.
Conditional detail fields for every selected setup request.
Ways of working
Ask how communication and feedback work best.
Preferences are conversation starters, not permanent labels. Ask how someone likes routine updates, urgent messages, feedback, meeting preparation, and decision summaries. Offer common choices plus room to explain. Managers and coaches can use the response to open a discussion, then revisit it after the relationship has real experience behind it.
Preferred channels for routine, urgent, and sensitive topics.
Feedback style, meeting preparation, and decision documentation.
Collaboration conditions that help the person contribute well.
Access and inclusion
Create a clear path to request support.
Make accessibility, dietary, scheduling, and participation requests optional, plainly worded, and limited to what the team needs to arrange support. Tell respondents who will see the answer and what will happen next. Avoid requesting diagnoses or unrelated personal history when a practical accommodation or meeting preference is enough.
Optional accessibility, dietary, language, and scheduling requests.
A brief explanation of why the information is requested.
A private follow-up route for details that do not belong in the form.
Ownership and follow-up
End with questions the team can close.
A response should lead to preparation, not sit unread. Invite final questions, let respondents flag urgent setup concerns, and define simple internal tags for the next step. Equipment can go to operations, access to IT, project assets to the account team, and discussion topics to the manager or coach before the kickoff.
Open questions and a flag for time-sensitive concerns.
Routing tags tied to a named owner or onboarding task.
A confirmation message explaining the next milestone and contact.
Related tools
Build the rest of your onboarding workflow.
Pair the questionnaire with a role-specific intake, information form, needs assessment, or follow-up survey while keeping each step focused on a single onboarding decision.
Practical answers for HR managers, people operations teams, coaches, and client-facing teams designing a better welcome.
What is an onboarding questionnaire?
An onboarding questionnaire is a structured set of questions completed near the beginning of an employment, coaching, client, volunteer, or member relationship. It gathers the context needed to prepare the next step: essential details, goals, logistics, working preferences, support needs, and unresolved questions. Unlike a checklist, which tracks tasks the organization must complete, the questionnaire collects information from the person being welcomed.
What should I ask a new employee before their first day?
Ask for their preferred name and contact details, role, manager, start date, work location or time zone, equipment and account needs, and any optional accessibility or dietary requests relevant to planned activities. Add questions about communication, feedback, introductions, and what would make the first week useful. Avoid repeating information already held by HR, and separate operational onboarding from sensitive employment records when different people should see them.
What should a coaching client onboarding questionnaire include?
Include why the client is starting now, the outcome they want, prior approaches, current obstacles, strengths or resources, preferred coaching style, scheduling and communication preferences, boundaries, and their own definition of progress. Phrase questions around the coaching engagement rather than diagnosis, and reserve topics that need nuance for a live conversation. The questionnaire should prepare the first session, not attempt to replace it.
How long should an onboarding questionnaire be?
It should be as short as the decisions it supports. A focused employee preboarding questionnaire may take five to ten minutes, while a complex client kickoff can reasonably need more context. Use multiple choice for standard setup, long answers for goals or nuance, and branching to hide irrelevant sections. Test the form yourself and remove any question if you cannot name who will use the answer and what they will do with it.
How do I handle sensitive or optional questions?
Collect only what is necessary for the onboarding action, clearly mark optional fields, explain why the information is requested, and state who will review it. Give the person another way to raise a private matter. For accessibility support, asking what arrangement would help is often more useful than requesting personal history. Configure access so sensitive responses go only to the people responsible for handling them.
Can one questionnaire work for employees and clients?
The same overall structure can work, but the actual questions should differ. Both audiences may need basics, goals, logistics, ways of working, and open questions. Employees need role, workplace, equipment, and first-week setup; clients need scope, stakeholders, assets, approvals, and project milestones. Build separate versions or use an early audience choice with conditional sections so each person sees language relevant to their relationship.
Is this onboarding questionnaire generator free?
Yes. Makeform supports unlimited free forms and responses, so you can generate, edit, share, and continue using your onboarding questionnaire without a response cap. A paid tier is available to remove the Makeform badge, but the questionnaire itself and ongoing response collection are not limited to a trial or a small free allowance.
What should happen after someone submits the questionnaire?
Send a confirmation that explains the next milestone and contact. Internally, review the complete response, route equipment or access requests, prepare relevant introductions, and add open questions to the first meeting agenda. Use the answer as the start of a conversation rather than treating preferences as fixed facts. After the first phase, a separate onboarding survey can measure what was clear, missing, or worth improving.
Start the welcome before the first meeting.
Generate an onboarding questionnaire your team can act on.
Unlimited free forms and responsesFour audience-ready starting pointsEditable questions and follow-ups
