The first month decides more than the first year

Early departures are almost always an arrival failure.

People who leave within a few months rarely leave because the work was beyond them. They leave because the role was not what was described, because nobody had prepared for their arrival, or because they could not tell whether they were doing well and nobody told them.

The preparation failures are the easiest to fix and the most common. A person arriving to no desk, no access, no equipment and a manager who is away has learned something about the organisation before lunch on day one, and it is remembered.

The description gap is more consequential. Where the recruitment conversation emphasised the interesting part of a role that is largely routine, the new person discovers it in week three and concludes they were misled, which they were. Describing the ordinary parts accurately loses some candidates and keeps the ones who will stay.

The third element is early feedback. New people cannot calibrate, and in the absence of information they assume the worst. A short conversation at week two and week six, saying specifically what is going well and what to work on, removes an anxiety that otherwise runs for months.

There is one arrival failure that is entirely invisible to the organisation, which is the person who accepted an offer and then received a better one. The gap between acceptance and start date is where a substantial number of appointments are lost, and an organisation that goes silent for six weeks after the paperwork has given the candidate nothing to hold onto against a competing approach.