Why do new employees leave within the first year?

Most employers picture someone who works for a year, slowly becomes dissatisfied and then resigns. In practice the moment sits much earlier. The decision is usually made in the first weeks, and the resignation only follows once something else has been found. What you see as an employer is a notice period in month eight. What actually happened, happened in week two.

The Dutch figures show how large that group is. Employees with less than a year of service change jobs more often than any other group: 7.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2025, against 9.4 per cent three years earlier. So it has become quieter, and it is still the group with the highest turnover. In an older CBS measurement covering 2022, almost 60 per cent of everyone who changed employer had worked less than two years at the previous one, 213,000 out of 363,000 movers per quarter. Early leaving is a large share of all job moves.

What it breaks on in those first weeks is almost always the same thing: the gap between what the job advert described and what the job turns out to be. Not because anyone lied, but because the text described the interesting part of the role and daily practice is mostly the ordinary part. On the Monday, the new employee compares their own expectation with what they see, and the difference is bigger than they had allowed for.

On top of that, the first weeks are the period in which nobody asks anything yet. There is an induction programme and there are systems to arrange, and the question of whether the job is what they expected goes unasked because it feels too early.

Not a model with five phases. Four things a line manager can do on a Monday morning.

Fill the first week with work, not with explanation. Someone who spends five days on presentations and manuals still has no idea whether the job suits them. Give them a small, real piece of work that can actually be finished. That produces exactly the information they need in order to stay.

In week two, ask about the difference explicitly. Not "how is it going", because everyone answers that with "fine". Instead: what is different from what you expected based on our conversations. That question produces an answer you can do something with, and it is also the last moment at which a misunderstanding can still be corrected cheaply.

Point them at someone who is not their manager. The questions that prevent an early departure are the ones people do not put to their line manager: what is it really like here, am I allowed to ask this, is this normal. Name a colleague where that is possible, and tell both of them so.

Book the three-month conversation now. An appointment that already exists gets kept. One you will make "some time soon" falls away in exactly the busy period in which someone quietly starts looking around.

What you should not do is fill the first month with a programme that mainly reassures you. Onboarding that runs smoothly and in which nobody ever asks anything real looks fine from the inside.

Part of it was decided before the person walked in. That is not a popular thought, because it moves a problem that sits with HR back to recruitment, but it is where we see it go wrong in practice.

It begins with the job advert. A text that describes the attractive side attracts candidates who come for the attractive side, and what they find is the whole job. The more honest the text is about the tedious part, the smaller the gap on day one. It costs you applicants and it saves you leavers. That is the same trade-off as with wrong applicants: more responses is not a result if they are the wrong ones.

It continues in the process. In a series of conversations where nobody corrects the expectation, the image the candidate has built up stays intact. We build application funnels so that the candidate sees early on what the work really looks like, and in our screening and candidate follow-up new candidates are followed up within one working day. That is not speed for its own sake: a candidate who is kept waiting fills in the picture themselves, and the same silence is why candidates drop out before they ever start.

And it is about what you project as an employer. The distance between what your employer branding promises and what happens on the floor is exactly what a new employee measures in their first weeks. We do not do onboarding ourselves, but we do see where in the hiring process that departure is seeded.

How common is leaving within the first year?

In the Netherlands, 7.3 per cent of employees with less than a year of service changed jobs in the second quarter of 2025, according to CBS. Three years earlier, in the same quarter, that was 9.4 per cent. Turnover in that group has fallen, and it remains the group that moves most often.

Is this an onboarding problem or a recruitment problem?

Usually both, and the order matters. Recruitment decides which expectation someone walks in with, onboarding decides what they encounter in the first weeks. If those two sit far apart, no induction programme makes up the difference. So look at what your job advert and your process promise before you rebuild the first month.

Can you see the risk during the recruitment process?

Often you can, if you ask for it. A candidate who never asks a critical question, or who says yes to every part of the job description, has usually not formed a concrete picture yet. Showing the ordinary side of the work during the process, and letting them talk to someone who does the job, surfaces the mismatch while it is still free to fix.

What should we change first if two new hires left early?

Start with the text and the process, not with the induction programme. Read your own job advert next to a description of an average working day and mark every place where the two differ. Then look at where in the procedure someone could have corrected that expectation and nobody did. The vocabulary that goes with this sits in our glossary.

Onboarding is not a service of ours, and the first part of this story is. At SocialFind we are happy to look with you at what your job advert and your process are promising. If you would like articles like this in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.