2 minute read
Posted by Chris Platts on 12 March 2025
There’s a reason why 55% of employees have quit a job due to a disconnect between the job’s portrayal in the recruitment process and the actual experience—a 15% increase since 2019, according to ThriveMap’s latest research. The hiring process is broken, and at the heart of it lies a simple truth: job descriptions are marketing materials, not reality.
Think about it. How often have you seen job listings that promise a “fast-paced, dynamic work environment” only to find out that means never-ending emails and back-to-back Zoom calls? Or companies advertising “growth opportunities” when there’s nowhere to move except out the door?
This isn’t just a minor frustration for candidates—it’s a critical hiring problem. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that mismatched expectations in job roles contribute significantly to early turnover, with employees leaving once they realize the day-to-day experience doesn’t match what they were promised.
Instead of selling dreams, companies should offer candidates a preview of the reality of the job before they accept the offer. ThriveMap’s research reveals that candidates who experience realistic job assessments are 3x more likely to stay compared to those who rely on job descriptions alone.
✅ Realistic job assessments give candidates an accurate, immersive preview of what the job entails, reducing expectation mismatches and increasing retention.
📥 Download the whitepaper to see how ThriveMap is helping companies tackle this hiring illusion and reduce costly turnover.
Subscribe for insights, debunks and what amounts to a free, up-to-date recruitment toolkit.
ThriveMap creates customised assessments for high volume roles, which take candidates through an online “day in the life” experience of work in your company. Our assessments have been proven to reduce staff turnover, reduce time to hire, and improve quality of hire.
Not sure what type of assessment is right for your business? Read our guide.
Hiring teams using Eploy can now improve the accuracy of their candidate selection by adding ThriveMap’s Realistic Job Assessments into their workflow. In entry level roles, first week attrition can exceed 50 percent, usually because the reality of the job doesn’t match what the candidate expected. This integration gives Eploy users something they cannot get […]
Continue reading
A guide to fair, consistent, and predictive selection methods for entry-level hiring. Every week another Reddit post goes viral, exposing the strange, improvised “tests” candidates face. And this week, one Reddit post summed up the whole problem in a single screenshot. A hiring manager proudly described their “punctuality test”: They join a Zoom call 15 […]
Continue reading
Personality tests can be useful tools in the right context. They offer structure, they give teams a shared language, and they can help people understand how they prefer to work. But when recruiters start using personality tests for hiring — especially as part of high-volume or frontline recruitment — things often go wrong. Misinterpretation, overconfidence […]
Continue reading