A restaurant owner I know hired four servers last summer. By September, three of them were gone. Not fired. Quit. His take? "Nobody wants to work anymore."
But when I asked what their first week looked like, the real picture came out. One didn't get a schedule until day three. Another spent her first shift following someone who was too busy to explain anything. The third said nobody told him where to park, so he got a ticket on his first day and figured the job wasn't worth it.
None of them left because of the work. They left because nobody bothered to actually bring them in.
Small business owners are busy. When you're running the place, training the new person feels like one more thing on a list that's already too long. So onboarding becomes "shadow Maria for a couple of days" and hope for the best.
Sometimes it works. Mostly it doesn't.
New hires show up excited and nervous. They want to do well. But when nobody explains how things actually work, that excitement turns into confusion. Confusion turns into frustration. And frustration turns into a job search.
The worst part? You blame them for not being a good fit. Then you hire someone else and do the exact same thing.
Replacing an employee costs between 50% and 200% of their salary. For a $40K position, that's $20-80K when you add up recruiting, interviewing, and lost productivity while the new person ramps up.
But for small businesses, the real cost is your time. Every hour spent posting jobs and interviewing is an hour you're not spending on your actual business. Do that three times a year for the same position, and you've got a part-time job just replacing people.
Employees decide within the first few weeks whether they're going to stay or start looking. Not months. Weeks.
That means your first week matters more than your benefits package or your pay rate.
A good first week doesn't require much. Tell them where to park. Have their stuff ready. Introduce them to people by name. Give them something useful to do. Check in at the end of each day.
Some businesses build this into a system. Tools like FirstHR let you set up onboarding checklists so nothing falls through the cracks. But even a paper checklist beats winging it.
High turnover usually isn't a hiring problem. It's an onboarding problem wearing a hiring costume.
Before you post that job listing again, think about the last few people who left. What did their first week look like? Did anyone actually show them how things work?
The answer usually explains more than you want it to.
