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A new employee being welcomed at her desk in her first week

Stop losing the people you just hired.

You recruited them, paid to onboard them, and they left before the investment paid back. First-year turnover is not bad luck. It follows a pattern, the pattern has causes, and the causes can be found and fixed.

Start a Workforce Strategy Conversation See What First-Year Turnover Costs You

First-year turnover is the most predictable turnover you have. The exit is set up in the first weeks — sometimes before day one. Which means it can be seen coming, and stopped.

How first-year turnover occurs

The decision to leave is made early. The resignation just arrives later.

Across roughly one million employee interviews, first-year exits trace back to the same handful of moments. Each one is visible to the organization at the time — if anyone is asking.

01 · Before day one

The job is described one way and experienced another.

Pay, schedule, workload, or growth were oversold or left vague in recruiting. The mismatch is the seed of the exit, and it is planted before the new hire ever badges in.

Early signal: work-life balance is the top reason first-year employees leave.
02 · The first 30 days

Nobody owns the new hire's success.

No plan, no working equipment, no one checking in. New hires decide in the first weeks whether this is a place that has its act together — and they decide fast.

Early signal: the first week is spent waiting.
03 · Days 30 to 90

The manager relationship never forms.

Managers hold the greatest influence over retention, and for new hires, that relationship forms or fails in the first months. When expectations, feedback, and recognition are missing, private doubt hardens into a plan.

Early signal: no one-on-one with the manager in the first month.
04 · Months 3 to 12

No visible path forward, no sense of belonging.

The novelty is gone. If there is no evidence of growth and no place on the team, the next recruiter call gets answered. By the time HR hears about it, the decision is months old.

Early signal: a good performer stops volunteering.
What it costs

Every first-year exit is a hire you paid for twice.

You absorbed the recruiting, the onboarding, the training, and the months of below-full productivity. Then you paid for all of it again to fill the same seat. A departure conservatively costs a third of the role's annual salary, and early exits cost more, because nothing was recovered.

Calculate your first-year turnover cost
33%
of annual salary — the conservative cost of a single departure
2×
the hiring cost: recruit, onboard, and train the same seat twice inside a year
3 in 4
departures are preventable when the causes are known early enough to act
A mid-sized example

500 employees at 20% turnover is 100 leavers a year. If a third leave in year one, that is 33 first-year exits. At a $54,000 salary, that is roughly $590,000 a year spent on hires that never paid back.

How Work Institute reduces first-year turnover

Find the cause. Fix the cause. Measure it again.

The same three-step path we apply to every workforce challenge, pointed at the first twelve months of employment.

01 Listen

Hear from the people living the first year.

Trained third-party interviewers talk with your new hires at 30, 90, and 180 days — and with the people who left before their first anniversary. Not a survey. A conversation people are honest in, because it is not with their manager.

The research we use
Onboarding Studies  Exit Interviews 
02 Learn

Find where the first year breaks, and why.

We trace the exits to their causes and show you where they cluster: which roles, locations, managers, and weeks. Benchmarked against roughly one million interviews, so you know what is normal and what is yours.

What you get
Root-cause analysis First-year cohort benchmarks
03 Act

Fix the first year, not just the offer letter.

A prioritized plan with owners: the recruiting promises to correct, the onboarding gaps to close, the manager behaviors to develop. Then we measure again, so the number moving down is a fact, not a hope.

How we help you act
Action Planning & Enablement  Leadership Insight & Development 

Every study is scoped to your question. Some organizations start with a single onboarding study; others pair it with exit interviews across the first year.

See the full approach 
Why this works when other efforts haven't

Fair questions from leaders who have tried to fix this before.

“We already run an onboarding survey.”

A survey tells you a score dropped at day 90. It rarely tells you why, and new hires hesitate to be candid on their employer's own form. Third-party interviews get the reasons in employees' own words — and in numbers you can act on.

How we listen
“HR does exit interviews already.”

Internal exit interviews skew polite and vague — people protect their references. Ours are conducted by trained researchers with no stake in the answer, benchmarked against roughly one million interviews, so the real causes come out and can be counted.

See Voice-of-Employee Research
“Isn't this just a manager problem?”

Often, partly. But the evidence usually shows a chain: a recruiting promise, an onboarding gap, then a manager who never had the tools. Fix only the last link and the pattern stays intact. We show you the whole chain, then help you decide where to act first.

Explore all workforce challenges
Proof, adjacent to the claim

Organizations that were losing new hires — and stopped.

View all case studies 
Healthcare
−42%
first-year nursing attrition

A hospital system paired onboarding studies with exit interviews of first-year leavers, then rebuilt its first 90 days around what it heard.

Read the case study 
Manufacturing
$3.8M
annual waste recovered

Exit and stay interviews traced avoidable turnover to two fixable causes leadership had overlooked — most of it inside the first year.

Read the case study 
Financial services
+18 pts
engagement in four quarters

Acting on voice-of-employee findings lifted engagement scores across every business unit within a year, and new-hire retention followed.

Read the case study 

You cannot make new hires stay. You can remove the reasons they leave.

The Work Institute belief
The next step

Tell us what your first year looks like. We'll tell you where it's breaking.

One 30-minute conversation with a retention expert — not a salesperson. Bring your first-year turnover rate and what you've already tried. You'll leave with the likely causes and the research that would confirm them.

  • Scoped to first-year turnover We come prepared with what we've seen in organizations your size and sector.
  • An expert, not a rep You'll talk with the people who run the interviews and read the data.
  • No proposal unless you ask for one If a study makes sense, we'll say so. If it doesn't, we'll say that too.

Book a first-year turnover conversation

We reply within one business day. No automated sequence.

We don't sell or share your information, and you won't be added to a drip campaign.