Julie Stein said she thought she had found her dream job. Her future employer promised 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, she realised 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, specialising in travel clients. Stein says that instead of being given autonomy, she was micro-managed. Instead of being encouraged, her creativity was stifled.

“At first I was hesitant to give up,” she recalled. “But once I realised 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.”

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 per cent 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, 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, has done considerable research on new-employee turnover and sees a growing problem. Gioia says that short-term turnover is particularly costly; many of the highest expenses come in replacing employees who leave in the first six to 12 months.

“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 organisation for human resource professionals that is based in Alexandria. “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 labour 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 specialises in labour law at Proskauer Rose in Washington.

“These types of agreements are generally enforceable,” said 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.”

?NYTNS