Four Most Recent Hires — LIMIT and OFFSET in SQL

The problem

Helix Systems' HR team is preparing a briefing for a new executive who wants to understand the most recent additions to the team.

Write a query to return the ID, name, and hire date of the 4 most recently hired employees.

Assumptions:

The employees table contains every active and former employee at Helix Systems.
When two employees share a hire_date, the employee with the lower id should appear first.

Output:

One row per employee, with columns id, name, and hire_date, sorted by hire_date descending (and id ascending for ties), capped at 4 rows.

Schema · hr 4 tables

departments

id integer

name text

location text

budget numeric

salaries

id integer

employee_id integer

amount numeric

effective_date date

end_date? date

employees

id integer

name text

email text

department_id integer

manager_id? integer

hire_date date

title text

is_active boolean

job_history

id integer

employee_id integer

title text

department_id integer

start_date date

end_date? date

Check answerShift Ctrl ↵

Run previews · Check grades

Write a query, then run it to see results here.

Worked solution Try it yourself first

Solution query

SELECT
  id,
  name,
  hire_date
FROM
  employees
ORDER BY
  hire_date DESC
LIMIT
  4

The shape

Sorting hire_date descending puts the most recent hires at the top of the result, and LIMIT 4 cuts the output at the four rows the new executive's briefing needs.

Clause by clause

SELECT id, name, hire_date picks the three columns the briefing displays. Other employee fields stay out of the result.
FROM employees reads every active and former employee on file at Helix Systems. The recency cut happens after the sort, not as a WHERE filter.
ORDER BY hire_date DESC sorts so the latest hire_date lands first. Casey Davis on 2022-09-01 takes the top row; the four most recent hires fall into the first four positions.
LIMIT 4 caps the output at four rows. PostgreSQL completes the sort, hands back the first four, and stops.

Why descending matters here

Without DESC, ORDER BY hire_date sorts ascending — earliest hires first. That would surface the four employees who joined longest ago, the opposite of what the briefing asks for. The direction of the sort is what turns "four employees" into "the four most recently hired employees," and the LIMIT is what cuts the result to briefing size.

You practiced sorting by date descending and capping the result with LIMIT. "The N most recent ..." is the everyday shape of a recency feed; the deterministic tiebreaker is what guarantees the same N rows come back run after run.

Return the ID, name, and hire date of the 4 most recently hired employees

The shape

Clause by clause

Why descending matters here

Reading explains SQL. Writing it, over and over with instant feedback, is what makes you fluent.