The Company You Thought You Joined

Long before we join an organisation, we have already started forming an opinion of it. We may know its products, recognise its brand or have encountered its people as customers, competitors or suppliers. We might know somebody who works there, have followed some of its leaders, or heard stories from people who left years ago. None of this necessarily tells us what it would actually be like to work there, but it gives us fragments from which we begin constructing a picture.

The recruitment process gradually fills in more of that picture. We meet recruiters, hiring managers and potential colleagues, read more about the business and perhaps seek out current or former employees. Each interaction provides another piece of information, although what we are assembling remains an impression rather than an experience. By the time we accept an offer, that distinction can become surprisingly easy to overlook. We may feel that we know quite a lot about the organisation when, in reality, we have experienced very little of it.

There is an interesting imbalance in this process, particularly when we are considering leaving somewhere we already know well. We experience our current employer in high resolution, complete with its awkward processes, difficult personalities, internal politics, questionable decisions and years of accumulated frustrations. The prospective employer exists at much lower resolution, largely constructed from reputation, selected encounters and the version of itself it chooses to present. The grass on the other side may not be greener at all; we simply have not walked across it often enough to notice the bare patches.

This information imbalance is more than intuition. Researchers combining employer reviews with actual job-application data found that the reputation displayed to job seekers affected an employer's ability to attract applicants. The effect was particularly strong for smaller, private and less-established organisations, where candidates had fewer other reputational signals available to them. The researchers describe online employer reputation as helping to address an information problem faced by workers choosing between employers, which is an important distinction. Reputation matters partly because, before we join, we have no experience of our own with which to replace it. [1]

Candidates are therefore not necessarily being naive when they place weight on reputation, nor does an attractive impression mean an employer has deliberately misled them. Both sides operate with incomplete information and both inevitably present selected versions of themselves. What matters is that almost nobody arrives on their first day without expectations, and those expectations have already created a version of the organisation in the newcomer's mind before meaningful experience has even begun.

When expectation meets experience

Onboarding is usually described as the process through which people learn about their role and the organisation around it. Systems need to be explained, processes understood, relationships established and enough information transferred for somebody to begin contributing. Yet another process is happening at exactly the same time, because the newcomer is gathering evidence about whether the organisation they have joined resembles the one they thought they were joining.

Research into realistic job previews gives us a useful indication of why that matters. A meta-analysis of 40 studies examined what happened when candidates were given more realistic information about the jobs and organisations they were considering. The effects extended beyond recruitment itself, with realistic previews associated with differences in initial expectations, performance and subsequent turnover. The effects were not uniform and depended partly on how and when the preview was delivered, but the broader point is important for onboarding: the expectations created before somebody joins do not simply disappear when employment begins. [2]

The first day therefore does not reset the relationship. It begins testing it. Some of the evidence comes from the formal onboarding programme, but much of it arrives through ordinary experiences that nobody designed to communicate anything. Does the manager make time for the new person? Do colleagues know they are starting? Is the laptop ready? Can they access the systems they need? Do people respond when asked for help? Individually, these can seem like trivial operational details, but to someone who has very little other experience of the organisation, they can carry disproportionate weight.

I once joined an organisation in a remote role and started receiving IT hardware from different directions. Nothing particularly consequential had happened; I simply ended up with equipment arriving through what were obviously parallel processes. Yet the experience communicated something that no onboarding presentation had intended to communicate. Different parts of the organisation were clearly doing similar things without necessarily being connected to one another, and that small observation became one of my earliest pieces of evidence about the organisation I had joined.

An established employee might have shrugged because they probably knew why it happened. Perhaps there were legacy systems, different cost centres or an acquisition somewhere in the company's history that explained everything perfectly well. A newcomer has none of that context, which means the same event can acquire a very different meaning. During those first weeks, there are simply not enough other data points available to distinguish an amusing anomaly from evidence of something more systemic.

The gap between expectation and reality is therefore not necessarily evidence that somebody was sold a false promise. Often it is simply what happens when a low-resolution impression encounters a high-resolution organisation.

Learning how the place really works

Formal onboarding can teach us what an organisation sells, how it is structured, which systems it uses and what its policies say. It can introduce the strategy, values and purpose, and it can tell us where responsibilities formally sit. What it cannot fully explain is how the organisation actually works when people need something from one another, and research suggests that newcomers do not simply sit back and wait for that knowledge to be delivered.

A 2023 meta-analysis covering 45 independent samples and more than 11,500 newcomers examined behaviours including sensemaking, relationship building, positive framing and attempts to negotiate changes to the job. These proactive behaviours were generally associated with better socialisation outcomes, while relationship building accounted for the greatest share of the variance in social integration. Newcomers, in other words, are active participants in figuring out the organisation they have joined, and the relationships they form are part of that discovery process. [3]

This builds on earlier research into organisational socialisation. A 2007 meta-analysis using 70 newcomer samples examined role clarity, self-efficacy and social acceptance as mechanisms through which organisational socialisation tactics and information-seeking relate to outcomes such as job satisfaction, organisational commitment, performance, intentions to remain and turnover. Taken together, the research suggests that becoming effective in a new organisation is not simply a matter of learning the technical requirements of the job. Understanding the social environment is part of the adjustment process itself. [4]

I experienced that very clearly when I joined what was, at that point in my career, by far the largest organisation I had worked for. I was struck initially by how welcoming and helpful people seemed. Navigating a business of that scale was unfamiliar territory, and there always appeared to be someone willing to point me in the right direction. If I needed something, a colleague invariably knew who could help and would suggest that I speak to this person in Finance, that person in Operations or somebody else who had dealt with something similar before.

It felt collaborative, and much of it genuinely was. As I became more familiar with the organisation, however, I started to recognise that the same behaviour could occasionally mean something quite different. There were times when everybody seemed remarkably good at identifying somebody else who could deal with a problem, and helpful navigation began to feel suspiciously like an organisational game of hot potato. The behaviour itself had not necessarily changed; what had changed was my ability to understand what might sit behind it.

That distinction matters because newcomers observe behaviour long before they understand the motivations, incentives and histories that produced it. Helpful referral and buck-passing can look remarkably similar from the outside, just as autonomy can resemble absent management, entrepreneurship can resemble lack of process, and strong governance can resemble bureaucracy. Experience does not simply give the newcomer more information. It gradually changes their ability to interpret information they may already have encountered.

The stories people inherit

The importance of relationships creates a complication that is easy to miss when we talk about networking and socialisation as inherently positive. Other people may be one of the newcomer's most important sources of organisational knowledge, but people are not neutral repositories of information. When an experienced colleague explains how something works, they transfer knowledge together with their own experience of it, and that experience inevitably contains judgement, loyalties, disappointments, assumptions and occasionally grudges.

What the newcomer hears may therefore contain enormously valuable institutional memory, but it may also contain organisational folklore that stopped being true years ago. The familiar advice that "it's not what you know, but who you know" takes on a slightly different meaning in this context. In a complex organisation, relationships are partly the retrieval mechanism through which knowledge becomes accessible, but the information retrieved through that mechanism has already passed through a human filter.

Research into workplace networks gives us some sense of how long building that retrieval mechanism can take. A study of more than 10,000 Microsoft employees who joined during the first three months of 2022 found that newcomers gradually expanded their workplace networks, yet significant differences between their networks and those of established employees remained even after six months. The researchers also found considerable variation between newcomers, with people whose jobs did not naturally require broad and diverse connections potentially at a disadvantage. The study was conducted in a remote and hybrid environment, but its broader implication is useful: becoming organisationally connected takes time, and it does not happen equally for everyone. [5]

That makes the people to whom newcomers are exposed particularly important. We once arranged an introductory conversation between a new joiner and a highly experienced colleague who knew the organisation extremely well, which seemed like an entirely sensible thing to do. What we had underestimated was how despondent that colleague had become. The conversation transferred plenty of organisational knowledge, but it also transferred a deeply negative interpretation of the organisation, leaving the new joiner questioning what sort of messy company he had just joined.

The answer is clearly not to expose newcomers only to cheerful corporate ambassadors, because that would merely extend the recruitment pitch into the first few weeks of employment. A better approach is to recognise that different people offer different perspectives and to think deliberately about the combination and sequence of those perspectives. A recent joiner sees something different from a twenty-year veteran, Operations sees something different from Sales, and somebody in another geography may expose assumptions that headquarters does not even realise it holds. Even the cynic may have valuable things to teach, but their interpretation is better encountered as one perspective among several than as the newcomer's first explanation of organisational reality.

When reputation arrives before experience

The same mechanism can operate before two people have even worked together. At a conference some years ago, I happened to mention to a business owner that a new senior leader was about to join the company I was working for. Their response was immediate and surprisingly strong: they had encountered this person previously, warned me to be careful and expressed some decidedly negative opinions about their earlier performance.

It was an uncomfortable conversation because I now possessed information I could not simply erase. I had not worked with the incoming leader and had no personal evidence on which to judge them, yet their reputation had reached me before their behaviour had. Whatever happened next would inevitably be interpreted with that information somewhere in the background, making it easier for a questionable decision to appear to confirm the warning and perhaps harder for a positive experience to begin from an entirely neutral position.

This is where confirmation bias becomes relevant, but it is not sufficient to explain the wider phenomenon. Candidates and newcomers face a genuine information problem, which is precisely why reputation, reviews and other people's experiences have value in the first place. The problem begins when prior information stops being one piece of evidence and becomes the lens through which all subsequent evidence is interpreted.

Reputation also operates at more levels than the corporate one we usually associate with employer branding. Individuals have reputations, as do teams, functions and geographical businesses, and newcomers encounter many of them before accumulating enough experience to decide whether they are deserved. Human beings have always exchanged this kind of information, so the challenge is not to pretend it can be eliminated. It is to recognise that somebody else's experience can help us understand what we might encounter without becoming a substitute for experiencing it ourselves.

The temporary value of being new

There is usually a period after joining when both sides grant each other unusual latitude. The newcomer can ask basic questions, misunderstand a process, contact the wrong person or openly challenge something that everyone else takes for granted, while the organisation tolerates these things because the person is still learning. At the same time, the newcomer often extends similar generosity towards the organisation, assuming that the confusing approval process will make sense eventually, the system-access problem is temporary, or the contradictory answers from two departments have an explanation they simply have not discovered yet.

There is research suggesting that attitudes towards a new employer can indeed change systematically after a move. Boswell, Boudreau and Tichy's longitudinal study of managers found support for what they called the "honeymoon-hangover effect", with job satisfaction increasing immediately following a voluntary job change and subsequently declining. [6] Later research using British longitudinal data complicated that picture by finding that the honeymoon effect was primarily driven by people who changed occupation as well as employer, while people changing employer within the same occupation showed a different pattern of adaptation. [7]

The useful conclusion is therefore not that every new employee inevitably falls in love with a company and later becomes disillusioned. It is that our perception of a new employer is dynamic rather than fixed, and that the organisation we believe we have joined in Month One may not be the organisation we believe we work for a year later. More recent longitudinal work adds still more nuance, suggesting that the nature and direction of the career move itself can influence whether a pronounced honeymoon effect appears at all. [8]

That changing perception matters because the early period also provides something the organisation can easily overlook: a newcomer who has not yet learned what to ignore. They can ask why three approvals are required, why two teams maintain versions of the same information, or why a report is produced every month if nobody appears to use it. They may understand business perfectly well while remaining ignorant of this particular organisation's assumptions, and that combination of experience and unfamiliarity can make their questions unusually valuable.

There is an interesting contradiction here for organisations recruiting experienced people specifically because they want a different perspective. We select someone partly because of what they learned elsewhere, then immediately concentrate enormous effort on teaching them how things are done here. Organisational knowledge initially makes that newcomer more effective because they learn where to go, how decisions are made and why certain practices exist, but there may also be a point at which familiarity begins to dull some of the outsider's perspective that made them valuable in the first place.

Good onboarding therefore needs to do more than accelerate the journey from outsider to insider. There is value in capturing what newcomers notice while they can still notice it, before unfamiliar practices become familiar and questions that once seemed obvious no longer occur to them. The organisation is teaching the newcomer how to understand it, but the newcomer may simultaneously be showing the organisation things about itself that its established employees have stopped seeing.

When there are several versions of the same company

All of this becomes considerably more complicated when there is no single coherent organisation waiting to be discovered. Businesses that have grown rapidly, expanded across countries or assembled themselves through acquisition can share a corporate name while retaining very different organisational histories, systems, habits and assumptions underneath it.

One part of the business may still operate through systems inherited from an acquired company, while another retains different processes developed for a particular market. Employees who arrived through separate acquisitions may continue to identify strongly with their original businesses, and different countries may have evolved perfectly sensible solutions to local regulatory or customer requirements. Ask several people how something works and it is entirely possible to receive several different answers from people who all sincerely believe they are correct.

Variation itself is not necessarily the problem. The greater difficulty arises when the organisation has not yet developed a sufficiently credible shared understanding of what it is becoming, because the absence of that common direction leaves space for local narratives to explain the contradictions. People begin talking about how "the Americans" do things, what "corporate" fails to understand, why "Europe" is different or which problems belong to a legacy company, and those explanations gradually become part of the internal reputation of different parts of the business.

For a newcomer, this can be deeply confusing. They thought they were joining one organisation, encountered one brand during recruitment and may have been shown one set of values during onboarding, only to discover several competing interpretations of what the company actually is. If leadership has not created a credible enough account of what those different histories are collectively becoming, the people a newcomer encounters will inevitably help construct one for them.

That does not necessarily require another corporate purpose statement. A shared "Why" only has value if people recognise themselves and their work in it. What matters is whether the organisation can explain honestly what it is, where its differences come from and what it is collectively trying to become. Without that coherence, onboarding can do little more than introduce the newcomer to a collection of organisational fragments and leave them to assemble the picture themselves.

When experience becomes reputation

Eventually, the newcomer accumulates enough experience that the relationship with reputation begins to reverse. Some of the things they heard before joining prove remarkably accurate, others turn out to have been outdated or unfair, and many become more complicated than the simple stories through which they first encountered them. Things they initially admired may begin to frustrate them, while apparent dysfunctions sometimes acquire perfectly sensible explanations once enough context is available.

Employees are not the only people developing these perceptions. Contractors, consultants, suppliers, outsourced teams and customers encounter different parts of the same organisation and carry experiences of their own into the outside world. Those populations also move between organisations constantly, which means today's consultant may be tomorrow's candidate, a contractor may become an employee, and an employee may later join a customer, competitor or supplier. The reputation circulating around an organisation is therefore being created by a much larger community than the people appearing in its employee database.

At some point, somebody asks the former newcomer the same question they may once have asked somebody else: "I'm thinking about joining. What's it actually like?" Their answer will not be an objective description of the organisation, because no individual can really provide one. It will be a version constructed from what they expected, what they encountered, who they met, what they learned and how they eventually made sense of those experiences.

The person asking will combine that account with everything else they have heard, the public reputation of the organisation and whatever they subsequently encounter during recruitment. Another expectation begins to form before another first day has arrived, and the process through which reputation becomes experience starts again.

Perhaps this is why organisational reputation is simultaneously so valuable and so difficult to manufacture. Companies can articulate an Employee Value Proposition, manage an employer brand and design an excellent onboarding programme, and the research suggests that these things genuinely can influence who applies, what they expect and how successfully they subsequently adjust. Yet reputation is also being created in thousands of ordinary interactions and experiences that nobody responsible for the brand will ever see, many of which appear too insignificant to be thought of as reputation-building at all.

The manager who makes time for somebody matters, as does the system that works when they first log in. The experienced colleague who generously helps a newcomer navigate an unfamiliar organisation matters, but so does the colleague who explains why nothing around here ever works. No single one of those experiences defines the organisation, but each becomes another fragment of reality that somebody will eventually interpret and carry with them.

The company we thought we were joining was partly constructed from fragments carried by people who came before us. Once inside, we gradually replace those borrowed impressions with experiences of our own, discovering along the way that the reality is usually more complicated, contradictory and human than the reputation that preceded it. Somewhere in that process, often without noticing when it happens, we stop merely consuming the organisation's reputation and begin creating it for whoever comes next.

References

[1] Ke, R., Ma, X., Sheng, S. Y. & Xie, H. (2023). Employer Reputation and the Labor Market: Evidence from Glassdoor.com and Dice.com. The study combines Glassdoor employer reviews with Dice job-application data and uses rating-rounding thresholds to examine the causal effect of displayed employer reputation on applicant behaviour.
Research paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02587

[2] Phillips, J. M. (1998). Effects of Realistic Job Previews on Multiple Organizational Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis.Academy of Management Journal, 41(6), 673-690. DOI: 10.2307/256964. Meta-analysis of 40 studies examining recruitment attrition, expectations, affective reactions, performance and turnover.
Research record: https://pure.psu.edu/en/publications/effects-of-realistic-job-previews-on-multiple-organizational-outc/

[3] Zhao, T., Liu, J., Zawacki, A. M., Michel, J. S. & Li, H. (2023). The effects of newcomer proactive behaviours on socialization outcomes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 96(1), 1-32. DOI: 10.1111/joop.12407. The analysis covers 45 independent samples and 11,508 newcomers.
Research paper: https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joop.12407

[4] Bauer, T. N., Bodner, T., Erdogan, B., Truxillo, D. M. & Tucker, J. S. (2007). Newcomer adjustment during organizational socialization: A meta-analytic review of antecedents, outcomes, and methods. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(3), 707-721. DOI: 10.1037/0021-9010.92.3.707. The analysis uses 70 unique newcomer samples to examine socialisation, information-seeking and adjustment outcomes.
PubMed record: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17484552/

[5] Yu, Y., Yang, L., Lindley, S. & Wan, M. (2023). Large-Scale Analysis of New Employee Network Dynamics.Proceedings of The Web Conference 2023. DOI: 10.1145/3543507.3583400. The study analyses workplace-network data from more than 10,000 Microsoft employees who joined during the first three months of 2022.
Microsoft Research: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/large-scale-analysis-of-new-employee-network-dynamics/

[6] Boswell, W. R., Boudreau, J. W. & Tichy, J. (2005). The relationship between employee job change and job satisfaction: The honeymoon-hangover effect. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(5), 882-892. DOI: 10.1037/0021-9010.90.5.882.
PubMed record: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16162061/

[7] Zhou, Y., Zou, M., Williams, M. & Tabvuma, V. (2017). Is the grass greener on the other side? A longitudinal study of the impact of employer change and occupational change on job satisfaction. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 99, 66-78. DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2016.11.005.
Research record: https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/71966/

[8] Zhou, Y., Wu, C-H., Zou, M. & Williams, M. (2021). When is the grass greener on the other side? A longitudinal study of the joint effect of occupational mobility and personality on the honeymoon-hangover experience during job change. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 42(4), 551-566. DOI: 10.1002/job.2491.
Research record: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/167573/

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