Staff & retention

The cost of a new hire

Professor Sanford Jacoby, in his time at Stanford, once noted that a new employee costs a company money in the first year. Recruitment, onboarding, training, management time, and the slow build‑up of company‑specific knowledge all come before full productivity.

If someone leaves within six to twelve months, the organisation doesn’t just lose a person — it loses part of an investment and must start again.

That’s why onboarding and retention belong in the same conversation.

The manager matters more than the welcome pack

Once a new employee starts, three questions appear immediately:

• What am I here to achieve?
• How does this organisation really work?
• Who can help me?

If these answers stay unclear, friction appears early, and that friction is useful. It reveals gaps in onboarding, but also whether the role was explained accurately during recruitment. This is where the manager becomes central. Not through another framework, but through simple, structured conversations:

• What went right?
• What can be improved?
• What do we agree on?

That last question turns feedback into a concrete agreement: what changes, what support is needed, and what happens next?

When several new employees raise the same issue, it’s no longer an anecdote. It has become s a pattern.

Check the match after three and six months

A candidate may look like a strong match during recruitment. The real test is whether that match survives contact with the actual job. This is where My Values Match can return after three and six months — not as another assessment, but through a few targeted questions:

• Does the role match what you expected?
• Do you understand what success looks like?
• Do you know where to get support?
• Do you feel connected to the team?
• Is anything blocking your best work?

Now the original recruitment data has something to compare with.

The candidate arrived with a picture of the role, culture, and employer. Months later, that picture can be checked against reality and the difference is the valuable part.

One complaint is feedback. A pattern is recruitment intelligence

If one new employee says, “I don’t know who to ask when I get stuck,” it may be an onboarding issue.
If four say it, the organisation has learned something about management or team structure.

If several employees say, “Development opportunities sounded stronger during recruitment than they feel now,” the signal points back to the EVP, vacancy copy, or how hiring managers describe the role. The same applies to values. If candidates show strong alignment before hire but report a values gap six months later, something is worth examining:

• Was the organisation describing an aspirational culture rather than the real one?
• Did something change between recruitment and employment?

These questions are far more useful than asking whether someone is simply “satisfied.”

Retention is about avoidable departures

People leave companies — that’s normal. The real issue is the avoidable departure:

• The job was materially different from expectations.
• Success was never clearly defined.
• Development paths stayed theoretical.
• Culture didn’t match what was described.
• Support existed, but nobody showed how to access it.

These departures contain information. And that information improves the next hire.

Closing the circle

Most recruitment systems stop at Hired. But the most valuable learning begins afterwards.

• Recruitment defines the expected match.
• Onboarding tests it.
• Three‑ and six‑month feedback shows where expectations diverge from experience.
• Retention outcomes reveal whether gaps were fixed — or became reasons to leave.

Over time, this creates predictive signals:

• Which expectation gaps repeatedly precede early departures?
• Which My Values Match dimensions stay stable, and which deteriorate?
• Which teams produce recurring friction?
• Which recruitment promises support retention — and which collapse within six months?

This closes the circle: Hire → Onboard → Validate → Learn → Retain.
And it uses what happens after the hire to improve the next one.

Jacoby’s point makes the economics clear: a company invests before it receives the return.
So the recruitment question cannot only be: Did we hire the right person?
It must also be: Did the match still hold once they joined?

At ferdge, that is where onboarding, My Values Match, and retention come together.

Find the match. Test it. Learn from it. Improve the next hire.