Do new employees often quit their jobs? 3 reasons you need to know!

This article from Aniday will share three reasons why new employees quit and provide solutions for recruiters or HR professionals. During the recruitment and onboarding stage, HR or interviewers can utilize interview skills, assessment tools, candidate experiences, and HR's attentiveness to confirm the work motivation and fit of new employees, reinforcing their intention to stay.

In an aging population era where the workforce is decreasing, recruitment challenges are increasing. It's difficult to retain new employees, but if you understand the reasons and address them correctly, you can effectively reduce turnover rates. Here are the three main reasons why new employees quit.

I. Personality

Many studies have shown that individuals with stable, diligent, and conscientious personalities tend to have stability in their work, are less likely to quit their jobs, and perform better. Therefore, when recruiting new employees, it may be beneficial to consider using personality assessment tools as a recruitment tool.

II. Violation of the psychological contract

The psychological contract is a series of implicit, internal, unwritten expectations that exist between an organization and its members. These expectations are not explicitly stated in written form but are formed through communication and interaction between the parties.

For example, before new employees start working, they will have expectations about the job based on the information they receive from the employer. If the employer states that the company does not frequently require overtime, but after starting work, the new employees find that the company frequently requires overtime, this will make them feel that the psychological contract has been violated, leading to an intention to quit.

To avoid violating the psychological contract, employers need to be honest and straightforward during the recruitment process, avoiding creating false expectations for candidates. Employers also need to provide candidates with sufficient information about the company, including company culture, regulations, and benefits.

III. Organizational socialization

Organizational socialization is the learning process through which individuals adjust themselves to fit specific roles within an organization (Chao et al., 1994). It can be compared to migrating to a foreign country, where it takes time to adapt to the local culture, geography, and other characteristics. Similarly, every new employee starting a job will need time to adapt to the organization.

The most common practice of organizational socialization is new employee training, where new employees acquire the necessary basic skills for daily work, such as using the timekeeping system, introducing the cuisine around the company, introducing company culture, and company history. These training contents for new employees aim to support their adaptation to the organization. However, scholars Van Mannen & Schein (1979) proposed that organizational socialization practices can be examined from three different perspectives, each of which can be divided into six different tactics. The specific tactics of the situational perspective are the directions in which HR partners can make efforts, possibly through HR's attention to understand what support new employees need in the socialization process, prevent the tendency to quit, and reinforce employee retention intentions.

HR's attention can take various forms, such as informal private conversations or formal meetings between two individuals. The organizational culture should be considered to determine the appropriate method. If people in the company feel uncomfortable sharing their opinions, formal interviews may not be very effective. HR's attention can also be expressed through collecting feedback using questionnaires or through interviews. If the HR department of the company does not have enough staff to provide regular attention, considering using questionnaires can alleviate work pressure. Whether anonymity should be used depends on the culture of each organization. The benefit of anonymity is that if issues are truly discovered, they can be addressed early. The drawback is that if employees do not feel safe expressing their opinions, they may not have a genuine voice. Conversely, if the company wants to build a transparent culture and encourage open contributions, they need to have comprehensive support measures to collect feedback that accurately reflects employees' thoughts.

In traditional business management, it may be believed that once employees join, they need to be independent, or it is assumed that those who will stay will stay. However, in this era of labor shortages, if companies can do a little more without requiring excessive costs, they can improve the employee experience, and each generation has its own work perspective. Business owners and managers need to change their traditional management mindset over time to achieve progress and sustainable business.

We hope this Aniday article is helpful to you!