The fresh-eyes report: template, questions, and what to do with it next

A new hire sees your company like nobody else does. They notice the software that crashes every Tuesday, the approval that goes through five people, the acronym everyone uses and nobody ever explained. Three months later, all of it will feel normal to them, as it does to everyone else. The fresh-eyes report (French companies call it a rapport d'étonnement, literally an "astonishment report") captures that view while it still exists. Done well, it improves onboarding for the next hire. Done badly, it mostly teaches the new hire that their opinion does not count. This guide gives a template ready to copy, and the part people forget: what to do with it afterwards.

Where the idea comes from

The term does not come from HR. The Office québécois de la langue française files it under information science: originally, it is the report written by a technology scout coming back from a trade show or a conference, telling their company what was new. The principle is the same in onboarding: someone arriving from outside reports what surprised them, because that is exactly what insiders no longer see.

No law requires it. It is a voluntary practice, which means it is only worth the care you put into it.

When to ask for it

Too early, and the new hire has seen nothing beyond their desk and their logins. Too late, and they have got used to everything. In between, there is a window of a few weeks.

• Announce it on day one. A new hire who knows they will be asked what surprised them takes notes as they go, instead of reconstructing it from memory.
• Collect it around week four to six. Enough distance to have seen how things really work, not yet enough to find it normal.
• Keep it separate from the end-of-probation review. In France, the probationary period for a permanent contract lasts at most two months for workers and employees, three for supervisors and technicians, four for managers (article L1221-19 of the French Labour Code), renewable under certain agreements. If the fresh-eyes report lands in the same week as the decision to confirm the contract, the new hire will write what is safe to write. Place it before, or clearly after.

The template: eight questions

There is no need to ask twenty. Eight questions are enough, in three parts. A one-page document or a short form will do.

What surprised you

1. What surprised you in a good way since you arrived?
2. What surprised you in a bad way, or made you lose time?
3. What information would you have liked to have before your first day?

What gets in the way

4. Which question did you ask several times, or not dare to ask?
5. Which tool or procedure felt unnecessarily complicated?
6. Is there a word, an acronym or a habit nobody explained to you?

What you would do

7. If you were welcoming the next person in your role, what would you do differently?
8. One thing we should definitely keep as it is?

Question 8 matters more than it seems. A report that contains only criticism is hard to read for the people who organised the welcome; a report that also says what works is easier to discuss.

Reading it without putting anyone on the defensive

A fresh-eyes report often points, without meaning to, at someone in the room: the manager, IT, whoever wrote the procedure. A few rules keep the exercise from turning into score-settling or, the other way round, into flattery.

• Say in advance who will read it. HR only, HR and the manager, the team? The new hire should know before writing, not after.
• Read the facts, not the tone. "The expense-claim procedure took me half a day" is information, however irritated the wording.
• Do not justify. The temptation is to answer point by point ("that's because…"). The new hire is not asking for an explanation, they are reporting. An explanation only belongs if it helps them do their job.
• Talk about it in person. A twenty-minute conversation after reading is worth more than a written answer filed away. That is often when the most useful point comes up, the one they did not dare put in writing.

The most important part: what you do with it next

This is where most fresh-eyes reports fail. The form is filled in, read, filed. Nothing changes. The new hire concludes it was a formality, and the next one fills theirs in with less care.

One simple rule turns this around: every report leads to at least one visible action, and the new hire knows which one.

• Pick one thing. Not a twelve-point action plan. The simplest fix among what comes up: a piece of information added to the employee handbook, an account created before arrival rather than after, an acronym added to the glossary, an approval step removed.
• Say so. "Following your report, we added this to the handbook." A two-line message is enough. That message, more than the form, is what shows the new hire their opinion counts.
• Compare from one hire to the next. A single surprise is an anecdote. The same surprise from three hires in a row is an organisational flaw. Keep the reports in one place and reread them together once or twice a year to see what keeps coming back.
• Close the loop with your onboarding journey. What new hires wished they had known before day one (question 3) feeds straight into preboarding. What they asked several times (question 4) belongs in the employee handbook or the onboarding checklist.

The most common mistakes

• Turning it into an evaluation of the new hire. The report is about the company. The day it is used to judge the person who wrote it, it becomes useless.
• Asking for it without reading it. Better not to ask at all than to leave it unanswered: silence sends a stronger message than having no form.
• Keeping it for managers only. Frontline roles often see the most concrete problems: the badly organised stockroom, the rota published too late, the safety rule nobody follows.
• Promising anonymity that does not exist. In a team of five with a single arrival this month, an "anonymous" report is not anonymous. Better to say so plainly and protect the new hire another way: by reading the facts without trying to work out who was meant.

At Weloom, feedback from new hires is collected at three milestones of the journey (day 30, day 60 and day 90): mood, a rating and a free comment. HR see the answers by name and sort them (to review, reviewed, archived); the manager only sees an aggregated view, shown once there are several answers, so that nobody can be identified. A fresh-eyes report in the strict sense, with the eight questions above, can also be added as a module of the journey.

Where to start: copy the eight questions into a document, add one line to your next new hire's welcome message ("in a month, we will ask you what surprised you; jot it down as you go"), and block twenty minutes in your calendar now, in week six, to talk it through with them.