Last updated: October 14, 2026
By Dave Manchester, Scientific Recruiting, KORE1
Was last year’s hiring any good? Look at who’s still on the payroll. New hire retention is the share of people you hired who are still employed at a set checkpoint, usually 90 days and 12 months, and tracked by source it’s the most honest grade your recruiting gets.
Most small science companies grade recruiting on speed. How fast did the seat close? How many resumes came in? Those numbers feel good in a Monday meeting. They also reward the wrong thing, because a QC analyst who starts in three weeks and resigns in month five was never a fast hire. It was a slow one with a nice first chapter.
I recruit for pharma, biotech, CDMO, and lab teams through KORE1’s life sciences staffing practice, and retention is the scoreboard I care about most. Here’s how to measure it when you don’t have an HR analytics team, what the number is really telling you, and why most of it gets decided before anybody signs an offer.
New Hire Retention, Defined
Quick definition first, because people mix it up with regular turnover.
New hire retention measures how many employees from a specific hiring cohort are still with the company at a fixed point after their start date. The new hire retention rate is the number still employed at that checkpoint, divided by the number who started, times 100. It only counts new hires, not your whole headcount.
So if you brought on eight people in 2025 and six are still here on their one-year anniversary, your 12-month new hire retention rate is 75%. Simple math. The interesting part is what you count and when you look.
Pick the checkpoint by what you want to learn. Each window tends to point at a different part of the hire.
| Checkpoint | An exit here usually points at | Who owns the fix |
|---|---|---|
| First 30 days | The job they walked into isn’t the job they were sold. Shift, schedule, instrument, or the actual work. | Whoever wrote the posting and ran the screen |
| 31 to 90 days | Training that never quite started, a manager who’s never around, or a counteroffer they took a second look at | Hiring manager and onboarding |
| 3 to 6 months | The training and qualification grind on a GMP site, or a skills gap the interview missed | Screen and training plan, together |
| 6 to 12 months | Pay, growth, the commute, or the first annual review landing differently than they hoped | Leadership, and whoever set the comp band |
Those aren’t laws. Plenty of people leave at day 40 over pay, and a few leave at month 11 because the job was never what they were told and it simply took them that long to find the next one. But when three of your last four exits cluster in the same window, the window is telling you where to look.
Why I Grade Recruiting at Twelve Months
Ninety days tells you whether the start went okay. Twelve months tells you whether the match was real, because by then the person has lived through a full review cycle, a holiday shutdown, at least one ugly investigation, and the first raise conversation, and they’ve decided whether to stay with their eyes open.
Science makes this sharper than it is in most fields, and the reason is training. Under 21 CFR 211.25, everyone working on a drug product needs training in the specific operations they perform and in current good manufacturing practice, delivered by qualified people. In plain words, a new QC chemist doesn’t run release samples on day one. They read SOPs, they shadow, they get qualified on the HPLC method, maybe they get gowning qualified for the cleanroom, and someone senior signs off on all of it. That costs the senior person weeks, not just the new hire.
Lose that chemist at month five and you didn’t lose one person. You lost the training hours, the senior analyst’s attention, and a slot on the qualification calendar. Then you start over. Ouch.
The wider labor market gives you some context for how normal short stays are. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ January 2026 employee tenure survey put median tenure with a current employer at 4.1 years, and manufacturing at 4.9. It also found that 20.6% of wage and salary workers had been with their employer a year or less, down from 22.2% in 2024. A lot of people are new somewhere. Some of them are about to be new somewhere else.
KORE1’s 12-month retention rate is 92%. That’s the one retention number I’ll put in writing, because it’s ours and it’s the number I’d want any recruiter judged on, including me. Ask every recruiting partner you use for theirs. If they only want to talk about how fast they send resumes, notice that. The other half of that bargain sits on your side of the desk, starting with feedback inside two business days.
Most Early Exits Are Decided at the Screen
Here’s my contrarian bit. Onboarding gets most of the blame for early turnover, and onboarding does matter. Our piece on onboarding practices that keep new hires past 90 days is written for tech teams, but the first-two-weeks advice travels well into a lab. Still, a great onboarding plan can’t fix a person who wanted something you never had.
The research leans the same way. A study of nine large firms by Burks, Cowgill, Hoffman, and Housman, published as The Value of Hiring through Employee Referrals, found that referred hires quit less often, and the authors traced the benefit mainly to better fit with the specific job rather than to referred people simply being stronger workers. Fit. Not talent.
Separately, a meta-analysis of 52 studies by Earnest, Allen, and Landis in Personnel Psychology (2011) found that realistic job previews, meaning telling candidates the unglamorous parts up front, reduce voluntary turnover mainly because candidates see the employer as honest. The effect is modest. I’ll take modest. It costs nothing but a slightly less flattering conversation.
Put those together and the lesson is that most of your 12-month number gets set in the first two conversations with a candidate. What do they actually want? And did anybody tell them the truth about the second shift?
The Blind Recruit, and Why It Shows Up in Retention
I run my first conversation with a scientist a particular way, and I call it the Blind Recruit. The candidates I talk to don’t know which positions I’m working on or which companies I’m working with. So when I ask what they want in a career, they have no reason to bend the answer toward a job they haven’t heard of yet.
Quick clarification, because the name collides with something else. “Blind hiring” usually means hiding names and photos on resumes to reduce bias. That’s a different idea, and a fine one. Mine is about the candidate being blind to the job, not the employer being blind to the candidate.
Why does it matter for retention? Because once a candidate knows the job, every answer quietly turns into an audition. Ask a chemist who’s keen on your opening whether they mind weekend stability pulls and you’ll hear “not at all.” Ask the same chemist, before they know your opening exists, what their ideal schedule looks like, and you might hear about the daycare pickup at 5:15. Same person. Very different data.
A few of the questions I lean on, roughly in the order they come up:
- What would make you leave your current job tomorrow, if the right thing came along?
- Walk me through a good Tuesday. What were you doing at 2 p.m.?
- Which part of the lab work would you be happy never doing again? Method transfers, investigations, sample login, whatever it is, I want the honest one.
- Days, swings, nights, or weekends. Which of those is a hard no?
- How far is too far to drive, and does that number change in January?
- What did your best manager do that you’d want again?
None of those are clever. That’s the point. They work because the person answering doesn’t know which answer I’m hoping for, and honestly, at that stage, neither do I.
Then I match. If your QC lab runs a 4×10 swing shift and the candidate told me two weeks earlier, with no idea your lab existed, that anything ending after 7 p.m. is a hard no, I don’t send the resume, no matter how good their Empower and LIMS experience looks. You’d probably interview them. You might even hire them. And there’s a decent chance you’d be reading their resignation letter by spring.
Candidates are people, not numbers. Treat them like a friend you’re helping find the right job and they’ll tell you the real stuff. Treat them like a pipeline and they’ll tell you what you want to hear. That second version is how retention numbers quietly fall apart. Our longer write-up on how we vet candidates before you see the resume covers the rest of the screening steps.
How to Track New Hire Retention Without an HR Team
You don’t need software. A Google Sheet or an Excel file works fine, and at 20 people it’s probably better than a dashboard, because you’ll actually open it.
Your payroll system already holds half the data. Gusto, ADP Workforce Now, Paychex Flex, Rippling, and BambooHR will all export a CSV with every hire date from January 2024 on and, for anyone who’s gone, a termination date, which saves you from rebuilding 2 years of history out of memory and old DocuSign offer letters. If those letters were thin, start the next one from our template for lab and QC offer letters.
Then add the 5 columns payroll doesn’t know about:
- The seat. QC Analyst II, lab tech, QA specialist, microbiologist, whatever the job actually was.
- Source. Referral, Indeed, your own LinkedIn post, an agency (name which one), an internal move.
- Still here at day 90? Month 6? Month 12?
- Voluntary or involuntary.
- One plain sentence on why they left, written by someone who talked to them.
Column 5 is the whole game. “Took a job 20 minutes closer to home in Carlsbad” tells you something. “Personal reasons” tells you nothing, and it’s what most exit paperwork says.
Look at it every quarter, so January, April, July, and October. Sort by source. Then by seat. Then by exit window.
A warning about small numbers, though, and it’s a big one for most labs under 50 people, because if you hired 7 people in 2025, 1 resignation moves your rate by about 14 points, so a single bad exit can make a decent recruiting year look like a disaster and a lucky year can make a sloppy process look brilliant. Read the sentences, not the percentage. Two “the job was different than I expected” notes from the same posting are a pattern. One is a Tuesday.
Split out contract-to-hire seats too. A contractor who doesn’t convert at month 3 or month 6 isn’t a retention failure in the usual sense; sometimes that’s the arrangement doing exactly what it’s for, which is the whole idea behind contract-to-hire staffing. Give conversions their own tab so they don’t muddy the W-2 direct hires.
What to Do When the Number Looks Bad
Window first. Then source. Then seat.
Exits inside 30 days trace back to the posting and the first phone screen. A typical QC posting lists Waters Empower 3, an Agilent 1260, LabWare LIMS, USP <621> and 21 CFR Part 11 experience, and “strong attention to detail.” Fine. Nobody quits over the Agilent. People quit over the 6 a.m. Saturday start in week 2, or the ISO 14644 Class 7 environmental monitoring rounds that turned out to be 20 hours of a 40-hour week.
So put the shift, the EM rounds, and the 4×10 schedule in the posting. And ask whoever screens your candidates, in-house or agency, what they ask about schedule and motivation before the interview gets booked. If the honest answer is “we check the skills,” well. There’s your 30-day problem.
Month 3 to month 6 exits on a GMP site are a different animal. Pull the training matrix for whoever left. Were they signed off on one HPLC assay, one dissolution method under USP <711>, and gowning by week 8, or still reading 40 SOPs in a conference room? Scientists get bored fast. I minored in chemistry and once planned on orthopedic surgery, so trust me on the boredom part.
Source clusters are the fun ones, if you like spreadsheets. Say your Indeed hires from 2024 and 2025 keep leaving around month 4 while your 3 referral hires are all still here. That’s the Burks finding playing out in a 25-person building, and it’s a better argument for a referral bonus paid at month 6 than anything a job board rep will email you. One agency’s placements keep walking? Call them. Ask what their guarantee covers when a hire leaves inside 90 days, and ask what they’d change in their screen. The second answer matters more.
Judge a direct hire search on who’s still there at month 12, not on how fast the first resume hit your inbox. Whether outside help pays for itself is a separate question, and the worked QC example in our piece on whether recruitment agencies are worth it shows how one early exit can flip that math by more than the fee.
One more thing, and then I’ll stop. A candidate on the market is like a professional athlete. If they’re amazing, multiple teams want them, and the team that lands them often isn’t the one with the fattest contract but the one that figured out what the player actually cared about. Keeping them is the same skill, just later.
New Hire Retention Questions From Small Science Teams
What counts as a good new hire retention rate?
Better than your own number from last year is the honest benchmark for a small team. With a handful of hires per year, one resignation swings the rate by double digits, so published averages from big companies won’t tell you much. KORE1’s own 12-month retention rate on placements is 92%, and that’s a fair bar to ask any recruiting partner about.
Do we count people we let go?
Count them, but in a separate column. Involuntary exits usually point to a screening or skills problem, the analyst who interviewed well but couldn’t hold a method in control, while voluntary ones usually point to fit or expectations, and those two need very different fixes. Lump them together and you’ll fix the wrong thing.
How is the Blind Recruit different from blind hiring?
Blind hiring hides candidate details like names from the employer to reduce bias. The Blind Recruit hides the job from the candidate during the first conversation, so their answers about what they want aren’t shaped by a specific opening. One protects fairness. The other protects honesty, and honesty is what shows up later as retention.
Ninety days in, can we already tell if a scientist will stay?
Partly, because 90 days catches the obvious mismatches, like the wrong shift or a job that turned out to be mostly sample login. It usually won’t catch the person who’s fine now but quietly unhappy with pay or growth. On a GMP site they may barely be qualified on their methods by day 90, so give the 12-month mark the final word.
Should contractors be part of the retention number?
Keep them in their own bucket. A contract assignment that ends on schedule isn’t turnover, and a contract-to-hire seat that doesn’t convert may just mean the trial did exactly what you paid it to do, which is surface a mismatch before it shows up on your permanent headcount. Track conversion rate and early contract exits separately, then compare both against your direct hires.
Count Who’s Still Here Next October
Pull up the list of everyone you hired last year. Who’s still here? Who left, and in which window? That list is the real report card on your recruiting, and it’s a lot more useful than time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, or the number of resumes that showed up in the first week, all of which can look great right up until someone hands in a badge.
If the list is shorter than you’d like and you want a second set of eyes on why, Let’s Connect. Bring the seat, the shift, and the exit notes. Expert in finding you the right talent, right away. You can also reach me on LinkedIn.
