A 30/60/90 day check-in template built from what you already know

Search “30 60 90 day check-in template” and you’ll find the same five questions wearing different fonts: how are you settling in, do you feel supported, is anything unclear about your role. Every HR guide runs some version of it, written for a company where the person running the check-in never touched the hiring process.

If you’re the owner, GM, or franchisee who wrote the job post, read every resume, ran the interview, and maybe scored an assessment, that’s a strange thing to hand off. You didn’t inherit this hire from a recruiting team down the hall. You built the case for them yourself.

A 30/60/90 check-in that’s actually useful tests the specific bets you made when you hired someone: what the resume claimed, what the interview showed, what an assessment flagged. No generic template can do that, because nobody else had your notes.

Most 30/60/90 templates ask how someone’s doing. That’s not the same as whether you were right.

The standard question bank looks reasonable on its own. Are you clear on your responsibilities? Do you feel comfortable bringing up problems? What’s your favorite part of the job so far? These questions work fine at a company where HR runs onboarding and a separate team ran the hiring.

They assume the person asking has no independent view on whether this specific hire was a good bet. They’re built to surface general satisfaction, not to test a prediction.

You’re not in that position. When you posted the role, read the pile of resumes, and picked this person over the others, you made a specific set of judgment calls. Maybe the resume showed strong experience but a short stint at their last job. Maybe the interview answer to your hardest question was good but not great. Maybe an assessment flagged a gap between how much structure they prefer and how much the role actually has.

Those calls are exactly what a generic check-in never asks about, because the generic check-in doesn’t know they exist. Yours does.

The decision closes faster than a generic template accounts for

There’s a real cost to running a check-in that only asks “how’s it going” for the first time on day 30. New hires make up their minds early, and once they do, most check-ins are just documenting a decision that already happened.

Nearly half of new hires already regret taking the job by the end of their first week, and by the end of the first month, 70% have decided whether they’re staying, according to BambooHR’s onboarding research. If your day-30 check-in is the first real conversation you have about how things are going, you’re not catching a problem early. You’re finding out about a decision that’s already been made.

That changes what the day-30 conversation needs to do. It can’t be a soft, generic icebreaker. It has to surface real signal fast, on the specific things you were unsure about, while there’s still time to do something about what you find.

Build the check-in from your own screening notes, not someone else’s template

Every hire you’ve made carries a short list of open questions left over from screening. Not whether this person is good, you already decided that. The open questions are the specific things you couldn’t fully confirm before day one.

If you screened candidates with a mix of resume review, an interview, and maybe an assessment, each layer probably left you with at least one thing you weren’t fully sure about, even as you extended the offer.

• From the resume: a tenure gap, a career pivot, a skill claimed but never demonstrated.
• From the interview: an answer that was good but vague, a question where the response felt rehearsed, a read on communication style that was more guess than certainty.
• From an assessment: a workstyle or preference gap between what the role demands and what the candidate scored on. A gap here just means one specific thing worth watching once the person is actually doing the work, not an automatic disqualifier.

That short list, usually two to four items, is the real agenda for your 30/60/90 conversations. It’s more useful than any generic interview scorecard or generic template, because it’s built from evidence about this exact person instead of a question bank written for anyone.

A running example: the office coordinator you just hired

Say you hired a coordinator, the kind of recurring, admin-heavy role that comes up constantly for a small operation. Screening left you with three open questions.

The resume showed a seven-month stint at their last job, shorter than you’d like for a role you need to hold steady. The interview answer to a prioritization question, something like “you’re juggling a vendor call, a customer at the counter, and an email that needs a same-day reply, what gets your attention first,” was solid but a little generic. And if you ran an assessment, it flagged that this candidate prefers more autonomy than the role’s day-to-day actually offers.

None of those three things stopped you from hiring them. They’re the three things your 30/60/90 conversations exist to check.

The 30/60/90 script, built around what you already know

Each check-in below has two parts. The first is a short, fixed logistics question, worth asking every time regardless of who you hired. The second is a direct test of the specific things screening left open, using the coordinator example above.

Day 30: catch the early signal before the decision hardens

Ask the logistics question first, so the conversation opens with something easy: is anything about the day-to-day different from what you expected coming in?

Then move to the open questions from screening.

• Testing the tenure concern: “What’s kept you engaged this first month? What would make this the kind of role you’d want to stay in?” You’re not interrogating them about their last job. You’re listening for genuine engagement versus polite filler.
• Testing the interview answer: describe a real moment from their first month where they had to juggle competing demands, and ask them to walk you through how they actually handled it. Compare it to the answer they gave you in the interview. A vague interview answer that turns into a sharp real-world one is good news. The reverse is worth watching.

Day 60: watch the pattern, not the moment

By day 60, you’re looking for whether early signal is holding or changing.

• Testing the assessment gap: “How is the amount of structure in this role working for you? Too rigid, too loose, about right?” If the assessment flagged a mismatch, this is where you find out whether it’s actually showing up day to day or whether it was noise.
• Revisit the tenure signal: are they still showing up with the same energy as week one, or has something shifted? You’re watching behavior here more than listening to what they say, because by day 60 most people have stopped performing “new hire enthusiasm” either way.

Day 90: close the loop on your own hiring bet

Day 90 is where you find out if your screening call was right, not just whether the person is doing fine.

• Are they meeting the bar you actually hired them for, the one behind the job post, not a lowered version of it?
• Which of your original open questions resolved cleanly, and which are still open? Write it down. It’s the fastest way to get better at screening this exact role next time you hire for it.

If you screened this hire with Truffle, most of that list is already sitting in front of you instead of living in memory. Truffle is a candidate screening platform that combines resume screening, one-way video interviews, and talent assessments, and the evidence from each layer stays attached to the candidate. The resume gap shows up in the AI Match summary. The interview answer to your prioritization question is still sitting in a 30-second Candidate Short you can rewatch before the day-30 conversation instead of trying to remember how it went. If you ran an Environment Fit assessment, the structure and autonomy gap is a single line, not something you have to reconstruct from a hiring round that happened three months ago.

That’s true whether you used one screening layer or all three. Every Truffle plan, from Starter at $49 a month up through Scale, keeps that evidence organized the same way, so it’s still there by the time day 30 rolls around.

What if you didn’t take screening notes?

Fair objection. Most hiring on a small team happens fast, and “notes” often means a gut feeling and a half-remembered impression, not a written file.

If that’s you, spend ten minutes before the day-30 conversation trying to reconstruct the two or three things you weren’t fully sure about when you made the offer. Most people can recall this if they actually sit with it. The exercise itself is useful, because it forces you to name your own uncertainty instead of pretending the decision was cleaner than it was.

And if you genuinely can’t recall anything specific, treat that as the signal to change how you screen next time, so the next hire leaves you with something concrete to check instead of a vague sense that things went fine. The same logic holds if your process was thin, a resume and a quick call, no assessment. Use what you actually have. Two open questions from a resume and an interview beat a generic template with none.

Screening and onboarding are one evidence trail when you run both

At a bigger company, hiring and onboarding usually sit on opposite sides of an org chart. Recruiting hands off a signed offer letter, and HR takes it from there with a check-in template that was never built with any specific candidate in mind, because it can’t be. Nobody who wrote it knew who you’d hire.

You don’t have that wall. The same person who read the resume, ran the interview, and made the call is the one sitting across from the new hire at day 30. Used well, that’s a sharper process than the corporate version, not a smaller one. The evidence you gathered during screening doesn’t expire the moment someone accepts the offer. It’s the most useful material you have for the conversations that come next, the same way a reference check is most useful when it verifies a claim you already made instead of surfacing a surprise.

Frequently asked questions about 30/60/90 day check-ins

How many questions should be in a 30/60/90 day check-in?

Keep each check-in to four or five questions: one logistics question and two to four questions tied to what screening left open for that specific hire. More than that and the conversation starts to feel like an interrogation instead of a check-in.

Should a 30/60/90 day check-in be written down or just a conversation?

Have the conversation, but write down what you find afterward, especially at day 90. A quick note on which of your original open questions resolved and which didn’t is what makes the next hire for that role easier to screen.

What if I didn’t run a formal screening process before I hired this person?

Reconstruct what you can from memory before the day-30 conversation. Even an informal hire usually left you with a couple of things you weren’t fully certain about. If nothing comes to mind at all, treat that as a signal to build more structure into how you screen the next role, not a reason to skip a real check-in with this hire.

How is a 30/60/90 check-in different from a performance review?

A performance review scores someone against a job description. A 30/60/90 check-in, run this way, tests specific predictions you made about this individual candidate during hiring. They can inform each other, but the check-in is about your hiring bet, not a formal rating.

Run one of these for the next recurring role you hire, using whatever screening evidence you actually have. If you want that evidence organized and waiting for you by day 30 instead of scattered across notes and memory, see how Truffle’s pricing works for resume screening, interviews, and assessments in one place.