The two clocks.

Somewhere in your organisation, there is a senior hire in month four. The review that will decide their future is booked for month twelve. Everyone involved believes that review still matters.

It almost certainly does not. Enboarder's 2025 HR Leader Survey found that 86% of new hires decide how long they will stay within their first six months. BambooHR puts a sharper edge on it: 39% of new starters have second thoughts during onboarding itself, before the ramp period has even finished. The formal verdict on the appointment arrives half a year after the person across the table quietly delivered theirs.

The company is still deciding whether to keep someone who has already decided whether to stay.

Two hands on one face

There is a clock in Bristol, England that shows exactly how this happens. It hangs on the front of the Corn Exchange on Corn Street, with two minute hands roughly ten minutes apart. The black hand shows Greenwich time. The red hand shows Bristol time, which is what the entire city ran on until the middle of the nineteenth century, because when your day is governed by the sun rather than the telegraph, noon in Bristol genuinely arrives about ten minutes after noon in London.

Then the railways came, and for a few years Britain ran on both at once, with passengers missing trains and timetables that could not quite be trusted. The Corn Exchange solution was to add a second minute hand rather than choose. Two times, one face, everyone beneath it squinting upward to work out which hand applied to them.

Every senior appointment runs on that clock face. The company's hand moves the way it always has: probation review at three or six months, first formal review at twelve, and the quiet institutional consensus that a senior hire needs a year to settle before anyone can fairly judge them. The hire's hand moves on its own time, invisible, unmeasured, and it finishes first every single time. Here the gap is not ten minutes but six months, and it runs in the wrong direction.

Nearly half of HR leaders in the same survey say it takes a new hire 4 to 6 months to fully onboard, which means that in half of organisations, onboarding ends almost exactly when the hire's private decision has already been made. The programme designed to help them succeed concludes just as the window in which it could have influenced anything closes.

None of this is an HR failure. Probation periods and annual reviews are governance instruments, designed to manage the company's risk on the company's schedule, and they do that job properly. They were inherited, the way Bristol inherited its noon. The problem is not that the company's clock exists. The problem is that nobody ever built the second hand.

Building the second hand

Designing for the hire's clock means asking a different question in the first ninety days. Not "how do we assess whether they are working out" but "what are they using to decide whether we are." The answer, whenever a commercial leader who left early is asked honestly, is roughly the same list, whether the mandate they were sold matches the one they found. Whether they can see how the business actually works, or are being left to excavate it meeting by meeting. Whether anyone senior has thought about their arrival for longer than it took to book the welcome lunch.

One commercial director described month two at a company he later left. He walked into his first pricing review and backed a discount the board had privately killed twice in the previous year, because nobody had told him, and he watched the room decide something about him in the silence that followed. He resigned in month seven, and the twelve-month review intended to assess the appointment was quietly cancelled.

Every item on that list is knowable and addressable in the first month. Front-load the context, show them how the sector, the accounts, the politics, and the numbers genuinely operate, and do it before they have to guess wrong in a meeting that matters. The companies that work this way are not being generous. They are simply reading the correct hand.

Which clock does your evaluation process actually read?