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Everyone knows some new hires leave in the first few months. Where their wrong expectations came from is a different story. That’s what our second question was about.
One in five left. Almost as many stayed and lived with it
21.3% of candidates have left a job within the first few months because it wasn’t what they expected. Then there’s a group that’s much harder to spot. 18.1% say the job let them down, but they stayed anyway.
Add them up and 39.4% have started a job that turned out to be something other than they thought. Employers only ever see the first group, because they show up in the turnover figures. The second group is still sitting at their desks.
What stands out is that the “stayed, but disappointed” group sits at around 22% for everyone over 25, against 12.2% among 18 to 25-year-olds. Above 25, people are more likely to stay in a job that falls short. Why, this research does not measure. It seems likely that more is at stake, a mortgage, a family, a salary you don’t simply give up, and that anyone with a few jobs behind them knows what a short stint does on a CV. For an employer, that is no reassurance. It means the disappointment doesn’t disappear. It stays on the payroll.
The wrong impression came from the conversation, not the job ad
When a new hire walks out after two months, the job ad is the first thing you reread. What was said in the interviews, you can’t reread. So we asked the people who left where the wrong picture came from.
18.7% say the job ad sent them the wrong way. The recruiter, the hiring manager and the team combined? 32.8%. Almost twice as often. The picture that fell apart in month two usually didn’t come from a piece of text. It came from a conversation. With someone who actually works there.
29.1% don’t blame a person or a text, but the work itself. They can’t say where the expectation came from. Somewhere along the way the picture took shape, just not anywhere you can trace back to the ad or to a single conversation.
What this means for recruiters
Early attrition is usually treated as an onboarding problem. These numbers put it earlier in the process. The expectation that didn’t hold up was formed before day one, and in a third of cases during a conversation with someone from the organisation itself.
That’s harder to fix than a job ad. You can rewrite an ad and run it past someone who actually does the job. But as a recruiter, you’re not in the room when a manager makes the job sound better than it is, and the candidate only finds out in month two.
The 18.1% who stayed but were disappointed might be the most expensive group of all. They don’t cost you a new vacancy, but they do cost you motivation. And they’re exactly the people telling colleagues and future candidates what it’s really like to work there.
You can’t stop a manager from talking the job up. You can let the candidate see the work before anyone starts talking about it. That’s exactly what a situational judgement test does.
A situational judgement test puts candidates in situations from the job as it really is. A customer who loses their temper. A colleague who doesn’t show up. A schedule that falls apart. Then it asks what they would do. It tells you whether someone fits the work, but it works the other way too. In ten minutes the candidate sees what they’re signing up for, and anyone who drops out does so before they sign, not in month two.
That’s the difference with an interview. In an interview, the job is described by someone who wants the candidate to say yes. A situational judgement test lets the job speak for itself, with scenarios drawn from what actually happens on the work floor rather than from what people say about it.