Tenure at a first job shortened to around 1 year and 6 months… 60.9% of companies experience early departures, and 'design' rather than 'observation' dictates talent retention.
New employees, hired with great difficulty, struggle before passing the three-month mark. When an applicant, carefully selected from hundreds of applications through a rigorous job posting, fails to integrate into the organization during the probationary period, the burden falls entirely on the operational team and the human resources department. While many executives dismiss this as a "lack of perseverance in the younger generation," various survey results point to a different picture. The failure to adapt during probation is less an issue of individual willpower and more closely related to how an organization welcomes and designs the onboarding process for newcomers. This article analyzes the phenomenon of probationary maladjustment from the perspectives of data, systems, and managerial costs.
The Probationary Period Is a 'Mutual Adaptation Period,' Not Just an Evaluation Phase
First, it is necessary to accurately grasp the essence of the probationary period. The probationary period refers to the time given for an employee to acquire practical work skills after signing a definitive employment contract. It is commonly operated for three months, but this duration is not explicitly prescribed by the Labor Standards Act. The reason three months has typically solidified as a convention is that related legal provisions dealing with dismissal and wages use three months as a benchmark. Article 26 of the Labor Standards Act exempts employers from the obligation to provide advance notice of dismissal for employees with a continuous service period of less than three months. Meanwhile, the Minimum Wage Act provides the basis for reducing the minimum wage by a certain percentage within the first three months for probationary workers who have signed an employment contract of one year or more.
There is a point here that management frequently misunderstands: the perception that the probationary period is a time for the company to unilaterally test and screen out employees. However, the intent of the system is closer to a bidirectional period where both the company and the newcomer get to know each other and determine whether to proceed with regular employment. While the company observes the newcomer's job suitability, the newcomer also gauges whether the organization aligns with their expectations. This is why the failure to adapt during probation cannot be reduced to the fault of a single party. Adaptation is not something a newcomer achieves alone, but a process built together with the organization.
The Scale of Early Departures Indicated by Various Surveys
Looking at the figures, the contours of the problem become clear. According to the economically active population survey on the youth bracket released by Statistics Korea, the average tenure of young people at their first job has recently hovered around 1 year and 6 months, showing a slight downward trend compared to the previous year. Dissatisfaction with compensation or working conditions was most frequently cited as the reason for leaving the first job. The fact that the duration of staying at a first job is becoming shorter suggests that departures are concentrated in the early adaptation stage upon entry.
The physical experience on the ground in corporate fields is even more direct. In a survey conducted by Incruit in May 2005 of 446 human resources managers, 60.9% of domestic companies responded that they had experienced "early departures" where new employees left the company within one to three years of joining. In the same survey, the response rate indicating that the average tenure of early-leaving new employees was one to three years was also the highest at 60.9%. The top reason for early departure was "the job did not match my aptitude," and 80.5% of responding companies answered that such early departures worsened the organizational atmosphere. Despite this, only 34.5% of companies responded that they operate separate programs to prevent early departures. In other words, while the problem is widely recognized, only one in three companies responds to it structurally.
Surveys from an even earlier point in time point in the same direction. According to a survey published by the Korea Enterprises Federation (KEF) in 2023 among 500 companies with 100 or more employees that hired new recruits the previous year, 81.7% responded that "there were employees who resigned within one year of joining." In the same survey, reasons for early departure (multiple responses allowed) included "the job did not match my aptitude" at 58.0%, followed by "acceptance at another company" (27.3%), "interpersonal relationships and organizational maladjustment" (17.4%), "dissatisfaction with salary" (14.7%), and "dissatisfaction with work intensity" (6.7%). Furthermore, studies utilizing data from the Human Capital Corporate Panel (HCCP) report early departure rates of around 30% for new employees in domestic companies, with relatively higher early departure rates observed in certain industries such as finance. Although it is difficult to simply compare figures due to differing survey subjects, timings, and samples, the trend showing that the departure of new employees within less than a year has established itself as a structural phenomenon rather than an exceptional event is consistently confirmed.
Why New Employees Break Down During the Probationary Period
While it is difficult to pinpoint the cause of adaptation failure to a single factor, three recurring axes emerge. The first is a mismatch between the job and the person. It is no coincidence that the preceding surveys commonly point to job suitability issues as a top reason. When the gap between the tasks expected during the recruitment phase and the actual tasks assigned is large, newcomers quickly lose motivation in the early days of joining. The second is the absence or inadequacy of onboarding. In organizations that consider onboarding finished after a couple of orientation days in the first week, newcomers are thrown into practical work without even clearly knowing what is expected of them.
The third is the gap between expectations and reality. When the impression of the company formed during the recruitment process clashes with the experience after joining, the driving force for adaptation drops sharply. This gap is not merely a matter of conditions such as salary or welfare. When uncertainties accumulate regarding what role one will play in the organization, who to collaborate with, and how success is defined, newcomers fail to connect emotionally with the organization.
Global research quantitatively supports the importance of this emotional connection. In a survey cited by the global research institution Gallup, only 12% of employees strongly agreed that "our organization does a great job with onboarding new employees." In another statistic related to onboarding, it is reported that only about 30% of newcomers feel sufficiently prepared to perform their roles after finishing onboarding. In other words, this means that a significant portion of newcomers who have gone through onboarding still spend their probationary period feeling underprepared for their work.
The Invisible Costs Created by 'The Departure of a Single Person'
The reason management cannot take early departures lightly is because of the cost. When a single new employee leaves, the time spent on job postings and interviews, the labor costs of HR managers, the operational costs of training programs, and the time costs of the handover process vanish together. Research related to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in the U.S. estimates that the cost of replacing a departed employee can average roughly 6 to 9 months of that employee's salary. Some analyses suggest that depending on the job and rank, total costs can expand from 50–60% to as much as 90–200% of the annual salary. These figures must be considered alongside the fact that there are large variances depending on industry, job category, and organizational size.
In addition to this, there are hidden costs. As 80.5% of responding companies pointed out in the Incruit survey, early departures deliver a direct blow to the morale of remaining members and the organizational atmosphere. Seeing colleagues who started working together leave quickly shakes the engagement of retained staff and transfers the burden of recruitment and training back to operational teams. Adaptation failure is not merely an event of losing one person; it is close to a cumulative loss that erodes the productivity and trust capital of the entire team.
Structural Prescriptions to Prevent Adaptation Failure
What should be done, then? The core is transitioning the probationary period from a "time of observation" to a "designed time of adaptation." According to Gallup's analysis, employees who had a stellar onboarding experience were about 2.6 times more likely to report being extremely satisfied with their jobs compared to those who did not. Moreover, research cited by the global HR research institution Brandon Hall Group reports cases where organizations with strong onboarding programs increased new hire retention by up to 82% and improved productivity by over 70%. While this is closer to an estimate showing the range of effects rather than a value uniformly applied to all organizations, the directional insight that the quality of onboarding design dictates adaptation outcomes is clear.
Pragmatically, the first thing that needs fixing is the clarification of expectations. Making newcomers clearly aware of their role, evaluation criteria, and collaboration targets from day one is the starting point. As Gallup emphasizes, the simple question of "What is expected of me?" is frequently left unanswered in the field. The second is strengthening the role of direct managers. The success or failure of onboarding tends to depend more on the level of engagement from the manager whom the newcomer faces every day than on the HR team's programs. Regular one-on-one meetings, clear and constructive feedback, and designing early success experiences become the core driving forces of adaptation. The third is peer connection, the so-called buddy system. When newcomers secure colleagues outside of work whom they can rely on early on, a sense of belonging to the organization forms quickly.
Beware of the 'Legal Trap' Known as Probationary Dismissal
There is a common misconception management falls into regarding newcomers who fail to adapt: the idea that probationary workers can be let go freely. Indeed, the refusal of permanent employment during the probationary period tends to be recognized with somewhat broader grounds compared to general dismissals. This is because the probationary period itself is a time to comprehensively observe an employee's ability and aptitude to determine whether to hire them permanently. However, this does not mean unlimited freedom.
The Supreme Court has confirmed in multiple rulings that the refusal of permanent employment for a probationary worker must also have objective and rational reasons recognized as justifiable under social norms (e.g., Supreme Court Ruling 2002Du9063, etc.). Therefore, companies must explicitly state in employment contracts that permanent employment may be denied based on probationary evaluation results, and they should leave evaluation criteria and work performance records during the probationary period as objective and concrete as possible. Adaptation support and evaluation records are not separate matters. Well-designed onboarding helps a newcomer adapt while simultaneously serving as the objective basis supporting the justification of an inevitable denial of permanent employment.
Implications for Management
The failure of new employees to adapt during probation is a managerial agenda that can no longer be reduced to a matter of individual aptitude. In an environment where the tenure of a first job is shortening, more than half of companies experience early departures, and those costs spread across the organization, how one designs the probationary period has become a core variable of talent acquisition competitiveness. The gap between organizations that leave adaptation to newcomers and those that design adaptation is projected to widen further in the recruitment market. Ultimately, the question must change from "Why aren't our new hires adapting?" to "What have we designed so that new hires can adapt?" Synthesizing research on onboarding and early departures reveals that experiences during the first 90 days of employment significantly influence whether that talent will remain with the organization for the coming years.