Why new hires keep leaving, and what is happening on the floor

The short answer

When new hires do not stay, pay and conditions are rarely the only reason. Several things usually stack up: nobody has agreed how to teach the work, tasks pile onto a few people, there is no one obvious to ask, the job differs from what was described, and the floor has no slack left for teaching. Before posting the next job ad, look at how the workplace receives new people. That makes the next hire less likely to go to waste.

Does "we hired someone, and they left" sound familiar?

You advertise, interview, and finally bring someone in, and a few months later they are gone. After this happens a few times, you have lost more than the cost of recruiting. You have also lost the hours the senior staff spent teaching. And the real reason for leaving is seldom spelled out. If it ends with "personal reasons," the company is left with nothing to fix and simply moves on to the next ad.

Start by writing down what the people who left had in common. Which week were they in, and what were they doing? Who was teaching them? How much overtime was the team working at the time? With those answers you can begin to separate a poor personal fit from a problem in how the work is handed over.

Pay is not the only reason people leave

Pay matters, but on its own it rarely explains why people go. What tends to happen on the floor looks more like this:

• Training: each person teaches the job differently, so the new hire cannot tell what to learn
• Workload: work collects around the most capable people, who then have no time for newcomers
• Relationships: nobody has been named as the person to ask, and everyone looks too busy to interrupt
• Mismatch: the job described in the ad or the interview is not the job they are given
• No slack: because of vacancies or a busy season, they are treated as fully trained from day one

These look like separate problems, but they often share a root. The content and order of the work exist only in the heads of experienced staff. When that is the case, the explanation changes every time someone teaches, and teaching becomes a heavy load in its own right.

A stretched floor struggles to train anyone

Take, for example, a factory line where one person has just left. The remaining team is covering the gap while a new hire starts. The senior worker has to run their own station and teach at the same time, so explanations get short and questions wait. The new hire keeps working with unanswered questions, gets corrected for mistakes, and loses confidence.

This is not a question of personality. It is that time for teaching has never been built into the work. The busier the period, and the more overtime there is, the more likely this becomes. Reading staff shortages from the way overtime grows is covered in our column on overtime and staffing.

Prepare to receive people at the same time as you hire

You do not need a formal training programme. Have these four things ready once a hire is confirmed:

1. Narrow the first month to around three tasks, and decide the order they will be learned in
2. For each task, put the steps and the "this is done" condition on a single page
3. Name one person to take questions, and lighten that person's own load a little
4. Set aside ten minutes a week to ask what is getting in the way

The first two are simply dividing up the work. When a task that one veteran has been carrying is broken into pieces a newcomer can take on, the explanation stays consistent whoever does the teaching. Our column on splitting up work held by veterans goes into how.

Attendance records help too. If a new hire is working a lot of overtime from the start, or is not getting proper breaks, it shows up in the records before they mention it. Rather than reviewing everything at the month-end close, check weekly for the first few weeks so you can act early.

Keep the review going

The onboarding plan is not a one-off. Whether someone has left or someone is settling in well, ask what tripped them up in the first month, and add it to the task pages.

Be careful not to tie this review to anyone's performance rating. If it turns into blaming the senior worker whose teaching did not land, problems simply stop being reported. What you are reviewing is how the work is handed over, not the people.

Summary

People leave for a mix of reasons: training, uneven workloads, having no one to ask, a mismatch with the job, and a floor with no slack, not only pay. Before hiring again, narrow the first month to a few tasks, put each on one page, and name who takes questions and when. Checking attendance weekly lets you see strain before it grows. None of this guarantees that people will stay, but it lowers the chance that the next person stumbles in the same place.

Dividing up work and organising attendance and handover records are also topics APOUL covers in consultations (accepted from 1 November 2026). For questions that need a labour-law judgement, please consult a licensed labour and social security attorney (sharoushi).