RIEB, Kobe University

New Hires' Job Satisfaction Time Trajectory

This study is aimed at quantifying the job satisfaction trajectory of new hires. The authors compared job satisfaction of 815 new hires to 1,925 remaining (non-new) employees, asking all participating employees a simple question daily for ten months: "How happy are you today at work?" With a full sample of 177.000 data points, we found high heterogeneity in job satisfaction among employees from 12 different companies that participated in our study. Also, supporting previous research, new hires started with very high levels of satisfaction compared to the remaining employees. The level of job satisfaction kept on decreasing (until 64th day), continuing at a slower pace, gradually bottoming out around the middle of the 7th month (195th day), when job satisfaction began an upward trend.