A thought.  If a person makes attention-to-detail mistakes at the start of a new job then the person will likely struggle with attention-to-detail errors in the future.

It seems to me people show their best stuff early. And attention-to-detail is a skill a person can control/influence with relative ease. For example, people ought to find it easier to fix attention-to-detail errors than fix decision-logic errors.

I'm thinking about two types of attention-to-detail errors:

1. Content-Transfer Mistakes: mistakes made while transferring information. Examples include mixing up numbers [like writing 632 instead of 623] and making typos. My point is: if a person makes typos when they arrive in a new job that relies on correct typing then it is highly likely they will make typos throughout their tenure in the role. Perhaps, there are 2 general causes for the typos: (1) the person lacks the ability…in this case to spell or use a keyboard and (2) the person lacks the ability to focus/attend…i.e., lacks the skill known as attention to detail. In the first case, if a person cannot spell or use a keyboard and the person’s role demands correct spelling and the use of keyboards then the person will struggle with the role. In the second case, if the person cannot muster attention to detail when they are arriving in a new role then the likelihood of them mustering attention to detail in the future is questionable. 
2. Pattern-Recognition Mistakes: mistakes linked to failure to be able to properly identify patterns & [using the word ‘patterns’ in a broad sense, including 'concepts']. An example that highlights the difference between this type of mistake and content-transfer mistakes: if you asked a person to copy and data-enter the sentence “Mary had a little lamb” and the person data-entered “Mary had a litle cat” then the mis-spelled word ‘litle’ would be a content-transfer error while the surprising arrive of the word ‘cat’ could illustrate a pattern-recognition error. It is possible that the person replaced the word ‘lamb’ with the word ‘cat’ because the person has trouble recognizing the difference between small four-legged animals. This sort of pattern-recognition mistake is very common in young children. It happens in business too…not, of course, in as strange an example as “Mary had a little cat”. As a business example from my past experiences in the energy sector: we thought and talked a lot about things like kW [kiloWatt] and kWh [kiloWatthour]. The two symbols ‘kW’ and ‘kWh’ are similar, however, they mean different things. The first is a measurement of ‘power’ and the second is a measurement of ‘energy’. When I first saw people typing ‘kW’ when they should have typed ‘kWh’ I thought they were making typos…i.e., I thought they were making content-transfer errors…I thought their brains were thinking ‘kWh’ but between brains and fingers an error message happened that caused fingers to type ‘kW’. Later, I learned some people did not understand the difference between the engineering concept/pattern known as ‘energy’ and the engineering concept/patter known as ‘power’. I was alarmed to find people, some of them engineers, were actually making pattern-recognition mistakes when I thought their mistakes were sloppy typing. Clearly, it is much more difficult to teach people the difference between ‘energy’ and ‘power’ than it is to teach them how to type ‘kWh’ and ‘kW’. Now, as you might be able to imagine, from time to time all of this took a serious turn for the worse when the people making the kW/kWh errors provided energy advice to industrial-energy buyers.

Two points:

It is important to give thought to the types of errors people make. If we understand the nature of the errors we have a better ability to help people overcome them. That said, if people make errors like attention-to-detail errors when they first arrive in a job there is a high likelihood there will be future problems. We should not ignore the warning sign or assume it’s just jitters caused by ‘newness in the role’.