No one should show up for their first day at a new job with no idea what to expect. And yet, that’s exactly what I did for my first job out of college. I’d moved 2,000 miles to a city where I knew no one, and I felt disoriented as I stepped into the office. Not wanting to seem naive, I hadn’t asked many questions. I showed up unprepared, clueless about the dress code or even where to take my lunch break.
To be clear, a company’s HR department should have a solid onboarding process in place, and managers should put energy into making new hires feel welcome. But what if your company doesn’t yet have an HR department? Or what if your manager is less than forthcoming?
You need to ensure your own first-week success. I spoke with HR professionals, career coaches, and executives to get their best tips for new hires who want to start on the right foot, and this is what they said.
Why is your first week on the job crucial for long-term success?
First impressions only happen once, and they can last a lifetime. No pressure, right? But just how important are first impressions to the long-term success of your career? Let’s see what the research suggests about your initial period on a new job.
- The majority of executives give new hires less than three months to prove themselves. A 2016 Robert Half study found that 63% of CFOs allow a new employee less than three months to show their value – and 9% give them less than a month.
- Ninety-one percent of employees consider quitting a job within the first month. That’s just one of the findings from another study of 9,000 job seekers in 11 countries. Poor management, inconsistency between how a job was advertised and how it plays out in real life, failure to fit in with corporate culture, and a poor onboarding experience were all reasons that might send a new hire packing. How you start a job has a huge impact on how things go long-term.
- Science suggests that first impressions are annoyingly persistent. According to a University of Western Ontario study, even if you later present yourself in ways that challenge a person’s first impression of you, their initial judgment tends to linger – especially within the same context in which they first met you.
“Imagine you have a new colleague at work and your impression of that person is not very favorable,” says the study’s lead author, Bertram Gawronski. “A few weeks later, you meet your colleague at a party and you realize he is actually a very nice guy. Although you know your first impression was wrong, your gut response to your new colleague will be influenced by your new experience only in contexts that are similar to the party. However, your first impression will still dominate in all other contexts.”
The good news? Even if you do start on the wrong foot (it happens!), if you continually challenge that initial experience in multiple different settings, your colleagues may eventually change their mind about you.
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