Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership

Last year, new-hire turnover jumped a whopping 15%! So everyone involved in hiring should take notice. This type of turnover may be the most painful of all turnovers!

Why New Hire Turnover Is Especially Painful

Of course, all turnover hurts; however, I’ve found that new-hire turnover (where recent hires leave within 90 days) is particularly costly and painful for a variety of reasons.

First, there is the profound shock that the entire hiring team suffers after learning that the candidate they have spent weeks successfully selling has abruptly and without warning decided to leave.

But there is also the painful realization that half a dozen employees who devoted time to hiring this candidate will now have to repeat the whole process. And this need to redo occurs just when the new hire was reaching their breakeven point in their ROI contribution. Which likely included tens of thousands of dollars in investment in recruiting, onboarding, coaching, training, and the new hire’s salary. All of which will now be wasted because of their departure. 

You can also pretty much guarantee that the hiring manager, out of frustration, will blame recruiting for the problem. And that will, of course, hurt your recruiting function’s reputation.

The hiring manager will also suffer another loss in team productivity because one of their team’s positions will once again be unfilled for up to several months. The hiring team will also likely encounter difficulty finding and convincing a replacement candidate to accept this now-vacant job, because any high-quality replacement candidates will be highly skeptical about why the last incumbent quit so soon.

And this time around, your second exhaustive sourcing effort will likely produce only a mediocre candidate, unless you have identified and fixed the underlying causes of the initial new hire’s quitting (which, unfortunately, seldom happens). Your replacement hire will also likely leave within 90 days. ¡Ay, caramba!

Identifying And Fixing The Primary Causes Of New-Hire Turnover

After extensive research on the causes of new-hire turnover, I have identified the three primary causes behind why new-hire turnover has recently increased.

Cause #1 – The job was misrepresented to the candidate – the most common and the second most impactful reason for the recent rise in early turnover is raising the candidate’s expectations for the job. Because, whether intended or not, a Glassdoor survey found that 61% of new hires found aspects of their actual job were different from the expectations the company had built throughout the hiring process.

Possible fixes: Start by warning the hiring team of the negative consequences from over-glamorizing the job. Then survey a sample of your new hires after the first month in order to determine if the new hire’s expectations about the job turned out to be accurate. And finally, specifically ask your new hires who then leave within 90 days (during their exit interviews) where they felt that significant misrepresentation had occurred. 

Areas where new hires have found the most misrepresentations:

• Employee morale (40% have found it)
• Job responsibilities (39%)
• Hours expected to work (37%)
• Boss’ personality (36%)
• Career advancement opportunities (27%)
• Senior leadership competence (23%)
• Company culture (22%)
• Salary (22%)

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Cause #2 – Today’s jobs change at lightning speed – in our fast-moving world, I’ve found that many more misrepresentations about jobs occur simply because today’s jobs and their required skills change so quickly. And that means that even if the description of the job was accurate at the time the req was approved. The new hire may find that, after as little as one month into the job, their manager’s expectations for them may have already dramatically changed. It is this continually changing job expectation (and not a purposeful misrepresentation) that is driving this dramatic increase in new-hire turnover.

Possible fixes: To minimize new-hire turnover in your fastest-changing jobs, you’ll need to continually update the job description that you give to the candidate. And then in key jobs where you have experienced new-hire turnover. You will need to provide the offered candidate with “an extremely accurate job preview” that has been pretested with other current employees in the job.

A second reason for this recent jump in new-hire turnover is the increasing level of importance that executives are placing on “almost impossible to fill” mission-critical positions in areas such as AI, cybersecurity, data centers, and Quantum Computing. Because these positions are so important and so hard to fill, I find that almost every hiring team is, to some extent, exaggerating these jobs to their top candidates.

Cause #3 – Weak after-hire services – the third major cause of early turnover is the failure to provide the new hire with the services and the help that they need in order to get up to speed. Whether the candidate has been promised them or not, new hires generally expect effective onboarding, immediately available training, new-hire retention actions, help with building their network, the required tools, and the coaching necessary to reach their minimum productivity level quickly. And when they don’t get them, new hires often assume that they are being set up for failure. So they decide to quit.

Possible fixes: To help your new hires be satisfied and productive. You’ll need to provide each new hire with a personalized 90-day plan to get up to speed. That not only tells the new hire what support services to expect. But it also provides a monitoring system (i.e., midcourse correction) that ensures that each of the plan’s goals for the new hire is actually being met.

Note: Learn how to identify candidates that are likely to become new-hire turnover here.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, some see the loss of a new hire as a minor problem compared with losing a seasoned, productive employee. However, I take a different perspective: you’ve already received significant returns from the longer-term employees, and they probably don’t have a long or steep growth curve now. In direct contrast, after you’ve invested a great deal of time and money in their hiring, their early departure has prevented them from providing any significant return on your investment. So when you lose them, you’re losing out on a much larger potential opportunity.

Thanks for reading and reposting this article.

Note for the reader

This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “The Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.
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Written by Dr. John Sullivan – This article first appeared in the July 28, 2026 issue of Aggressive Talent Management.