March 27, 2005 What to Do When the Ideal Job Proves Not to Be as Advertised By DAVID KOEPPEL
The New York Times
Julie Stein said she thought she had found her dream job. Her future employer promised Ms. Stein, a 26-year-old New Yorker, a position more prestigious than her previous job, with added responsibility, a list of stellar clients and a higher salary. The new job, at a public relations firm, would use her creativity and allow her to travel to exciting places. Or so she thought.
Within two weeks of starting as an account manager, in the summer of 2003, she realized that few of the promises made were ever going to be kept. She was given duties like emptying trash and cleaning floors, and was told that in a small firm "everyone has to do different things."
After fewer than three weeks on the job, she resigned and returned to her former employer, also a public relations firm based in New York, specializing in travel clients. Ms. Stein says that instead of being given autonomy, she was micromanaged. Instead of being encouraged, her creativity was stifled.
"At first I was hesitant to give up," she recalled. "But once I realized that it was futile, I sat down with my boss and said that I didn't want them to invest more time and money in me and the best thing to do was to leave. I think they were appreciative that I wasn't going to waste more of their time."
Leaving or being dismissed from a job months or even weeks after being hired can take a huge toll on both employee and employer. For companies, short-term turnover, generally defined as leaving a job within a year of being hired, can have a big impact: lower profitability, higher retraining costs, lack of continuity and unhappy customers.
For employees, leaving soon after being hired can result in a reputation of being difficult to deal with or unable to commit to a job. It may be a red flag to future employers.
About 22 percent of American workers voluntarily leave their jobs within the first year, according to a 2003 survey by the Saratoga Institute, a subsidiary of the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. In a separate study, the institute, which is based in San Jose, Calif., found through exit interviews that common reasons for new-employee turnover included discovering that a job did not live up to expectations, and finding a lack of opportunity and job growth.
Joyce Gioia, president of the Herman Group, a management consulting firm in Greensboro, N.C., has done considerable research on new-employee turnover and sees a growing problem. Many of the nation's largest cities are shifting back to a seller's market, she noted, from the employer-friendly market that predominated from 2000 through 2004. Ms. Gioia says that short-term turnover is particularly costly; many of the highest expenses come in replacing employees who leave in the first 6 to 12 months. These include expenses for orientation, advertising, training and background checks.
An October 2004 study by the Employment Policy Foundation, a public policy research organization in Washington, found that turnover costs averaged $13,355 for a full-time private-sector worker, up 6.8 percent from a $12,506 average cost in 2002.
"An employee is not as effective at the beginning of a job as they will be a year later," said John Dooney, manager for strategic research at the Society for Human Resource Management, a trade organization for human resource professionals that is based in Alexandria, Va. "If someone leaves right away, the company never enjoys the true benefit of their full competency or productivity. It's very disruptive and disheartening."
In fact, human resources professionals and labor lawyers say that more companies are compelling employees to sign employment agreements that hold workers responsible for repaying training, tuition and relocation costs if they leave their jobs within a specified period.
Usually this period is a year, said Lawrence Z. Lorber, a lawyer who specializes in labor law at Proskauer Rose in Washington.
"These types of agreements exist more and more and are generally enforceable," said Mr. Lorber, who also noted that the agreements were not restricted to high-level executives. "Companies don't want to spend money training their people for competitors."
But many specialists say they believe that developing corporate loyalty involves something more than binding an employee to an ironclad contract; it involves honesty, keeping promises and having a retention strategy.
Tory Johnson, chief executive of Women for Hire, a New York group that organizes job fairs, has heard from many private clients who say they believed they had found perfect jobs, only to see their expectations crumble.
Ms. Johnson recommends that those unhappy in a new job should first try to "finesse some middle ground" before quitting. If repeated attempts to resolve the situation do not work, she suggests that it is best to leave as soon as possible. A good exit strategy is to return to a former employer, if possible, as Ms. Stein did in 2003.
When explaining the decision, it is best to focus on how the job did not turn out to be what was promised, Ms. Johnson said.
That was the case for Brian Hegarty, who after just three months quit what seemed like a promising position with a Philadelphia-area Internet company that designs e-commerce sites for large corporate clients.
Last May, Mr. Hegarty, 34, was hired as the organization's senior copy chief, responsible for writing a series of copy and grammatical style guides that employees were supposed to follow when setting up and maintaining client Web sites.
But after several weeks on the job, he began to realize that no one was interested in consulting the manuals. "My jaw dropped when a co-worker approached me and said no one was ever going to read the guidelines," Mr. Hegarty recalled. "This had been the big selling point in taking the job. It was disheartening."
There were other signs that taking the position was a mistake. At company meetings, he was often introduced by the wrong job title, and other employees did not seem to have any idea what his responsibilities were. In August, he told his supervisor he was quitting. He was hired as copy chief for a law journal in Philadelphia and was candid in telling his new employers about the unmet expectations of his previous job.
Mr. Dooney of the Society for Human Resource Management said companies should put more effort into keeping new employees. He recommends that employers be more candid in the interview process and make sure that job candidates are given a realistic preview and a clear understanding of job expectations. Ms. Gioia of the Herman Group agrees. She has written extensively about "onboarding," a strategy intended to retain new employees. Onboarding includes assigning new employees company "buddies" and mentors who can help educate them about the company culture.
"A company will make all kinds of promises to an employee when they come on board," she said. "But when employees feel like those promises are not being kept or they don't feel valued, they will become very unhappy and leave."
