Health and safety in New Zealand is an important issue in many aspects of organisational functioning, the intention of this research is to contribute to this field. This research focuses on new employees, and how their different experiences and safety expectations may lead to various safety outcomes. This study analysed 5 hypotheses to extract evidence to support differences between 4 new employee types. These employee types are classified as school leavers, career transition, career focused and occupational focused, which are predicted to differ in terms of previous workplace experience and safety expectations. The hypotheses focused on 5 important outcome variables. These were; speed of familiarization, perceived job risk and safety risk, met safety expectations, accident/injury frequency and safety communication frequency which were predicted to vary across the different new employee groups. Results showed partial support for hypotheses involving speed of familiarisation, met safety expectations and safety communication frequency. No considerable support was found for perceived job risk, safety risk and accident/injury frequency. Implications for organisations and induction processes are included in the discussion.