New hires' job satisfaction time trajectory

This study is aimed at quantifying the job satisfaction trajectory of new hires. The authors compared job satisfaction of 815 new hires to 1,925 non-new employees, asking all participating employees a simple daily question for ten months: 'how happy are you today at work?'. With a sample of 187.137 data points, we found a high heterogeneity in job satisfaction among employees from 12 different companies that participated in our study. On the tenets of acculturation theory and more fine-grained data, we support previous research that new hires started with a 27% higher job satisfaction compared to the non-new employees. The level of job satisfaction kept on decreasing (until 64th day), continuing at a slower pace, gradually bottoming out after eight months. The ratio of new hires' job satisfaction to non-new employees began an upward trend between the sixth and the seventh month (195th day).