What is First-Year Turnover?
First-year turnover is the percentage of new hires who leave a company, voluntarily or involuntarily, within their first twelve months of employment.
Why does First-Year Turnover matter?
High first-year turnover is often a sign of a mismatch in the hiring process, onboarding, or role expectations, and it is expensive to replace a hire that soon after investing in sourcing, interviewing, and training.
How does First-Year Turnover work?
HR calculates first-year turnover by tracking the percentage of a given hiring cohort who are no longer employed at the 12-month mark, often broken down by department, source of hire, or hiring manager to identify patterns.
Frequently asked questions
What causes high first-year turnover?
Common causes include a poor culture or role fit, unclear expectations set during hiring, inadequate onboarding, or compensation that doesn’t match market rates.
How does first-year turnover relate to quality of hire?
It is one of the clearest, most direct signals feeding into a quality-of-hire assessment, since early departure usually indicates a hiring or onboarding mismatch.
How BrightMove helps
BrightMove’s Wisdom analytics platform helps agencies and employers track first-year turnover back to source, recruiter, and hiring process. See BrightMove’s recruiting analytics.