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A tradesperson who leaves in the first 90 days is the most expensive hiring outcome there is. You pay the recruitment cost, the onboarding time, the productivity gap, and then you pay all of it again - while the role sits open for a second time in a market where half of trades occupations are in national shortage.
What makes it worse is that the causes are almost always set before day one.
The most common early-departure cause is not a bad hire. It is an accurate hire who was sold an inaccurate job.
Picture a service technician who accepted a role advertised as "occasional after-hours work" and finds himself on call one week in two. Nothing was misrepresented on purpose. The employer genuinely thought of it as occasional. The technician priced his acceptance on a different understanding.
He does not complain. He works out his fortnight, takes the next call from a recruiter, and leaves at week ten.
The fix is uncomfortable and free: describe the job accurately, including the parts that are hard. Candidates who accept a role knowing about the on-call roster stay. Candidates who discover it in week three leave.
1. Hours and on-call. State the roster and the payment. "Occasional" is not a specification.
2. The vehicle. Does it go home? Is fuel covered? Is personal use allowed? This is one of the highest-value components of a trades package and one of the most vaguely described.
3. Who they actually report to. People leave supervisors far more often than they leave companies. If the foreman is difficult, the candidate finds out in week two, and no salary fixes it.
4. The work mix. A technician told he is doing commercial maintenance who spends his first month on domestic callouts has been given a different job than the one he accepted.
5. Travel and territory. How far, how often, whose time. Two hours a day unpaid in a ute is a resignation forming slowly.
A meaningful share of 90-day departures are people whose original reason for leaving was never actually addressed - by you or by their old employer.
If someone accepts your offer and their previous employer counters, and they decline the counter but the underlying issue was money, you have hired someone whose problem is solved for about a quarter.
Ask at offer stage what would make them stay where they are. If the answer is something you cannot provide, you have learned it before you paid for it.
Tools and access on day one. A tradesperson standing around because the vehicle is not ready or the site inductions are not booked learns something about the business in the first week that is very hard to unlearn.
Someone owns them. Not a policy - a person, named, whose job it is to check how the first fortnight went.
A real conversation at four weeks. Not a performance review. "What is different from what you expected?" The honest answers arrive in week four and stop arriving by week twelve.
Half of technician and trades occupations sit in national shortage, and 67 trades occupations have been in persistent shortage since 2021 (Jobs and Skills Australia). Replacing someone is not a routine transaction.
And in a trade, reputation travels. A technician who leaves a job at ten weeks tells other technicians why. In a market this small, that conversation reaches your next three candidates before your job ad does.
Almost every 90-day departure was decided before the person started, by a description that was optimistic rather than accurate. Describing the hard parts costs you some candidates at offer stage and saves you the expensive ones at week ten.
HJ Recruitment places permanent electrical, plumbing, HVAC and refrigeration, fire and solar tradespeople with Australian employers. We tell candidates the hard parts of a job before they accept it, because a placement that leaves at ten weeks is a failure on both sides.
Sources- Jobs and Skills Australia - Current skills shortages
