New hires are not quitting over the job. New research suggests some of them are quitting over the paperwork that came before it.
A 2026 Adobe Acrobat survey of 1,006 U.S. employees who started a job within the past two years found that new hires receive an average of 13 onboarding documents and spend roughly 12 hours reviewing materials in their first week, with the heaviest-hit tenth of respondents facing 30 or more documents and 35-plus hours. Sixty-three percent said they were asked to provide the same information more than once across different forms. Forty-one percent signed documents without fully reading them, and 64% said they relied on coworkers to explain things that should have been in the official materials. Only 60% of what they received was later judged necessary at all.
The cost shows up in performance and retention, not just annoyance. One in four respondents said onboarding confusion had a moderate or significant negative effect on their job performance or confidence, and more than one in five said the experience made them question their decision to join the company. Satisfaction still landed at 62% overall, but it was not evenly distributed.
That unevenness is the original finding worth flagging. Hybrid employees, now the default working arrangement at most large employers, reported the lowest material retention of any group (47% retained more than half of what they were given) and were the most likely to receive onboarding content written in overly complex or legalistic language. Remote employees, working from a single dedicated setup with fewer competing in-office distractions, reported the highest onboarding satisfaction. HRTech has tracked this same infrastructure lag in other parts of the HR stack, from who gets trained on new systems and who does not to managers left to explain tools they were never taught. Onboarding fits the pattern: the process was built for one working arrangement and never redesigned for the mixed one most companies actually run today.
