Why employers view job-hopping negatively
Arindam Chandra
If you know someone who habitually “hops” between jobs, resulting in a short tenure with any employer, you would have most probably classified him or her as a job hopper.
Job-hopping is viewed rather negatively by most employers and hiring managers who opt not to interview someone who has had short-tenure jobs, even if the candidate has the required expertise and experience for a particular position.
Why is that?
1. For starters, the cost of hiring a job hopper is not worth the short-term value they bring to the company. Employers and hiring managers don’t want to go through the difficult process of hiring someone, training them and getting them up and running, only to lose them when they have started becoming productive.
2. Second, it is bad for team morale when people quit because employees who stay behind may think that their employer is not able to retain good talent and this sometimes weakens their resolve. This explains why a job hopper, though brilliant, may not be considered.
3. Third, job hoppers create more attrition which has a negative impact on the employer’s brand, making them a poor prospect for potential new employees. Employee loyalty attracts prospective new employees.
4. Fourth, it is generally considered that job hopping is more about trying to increase the hopper’s pay (as employers are mostly willing to offer higher pay to entice new talent than to retain talent) and less about learning new skills or be exposed to new ideas and people.
While they are all valid reasons, here are a few contrarian aspects we need to think about:
1. An employer or hiring manager’s biases may determine who qualifies as a job hopper because there is no universal standard. A start-up working on cutting technology or a young hiring manager may consider one year tenure in a job as the minimum acceptable limit while an established firm or an older manager who has spent many years in the same firm may consider at least 3 years’ average tenure as acceptable.2. An employer or hiring manager might consider job-hopping as a red flag but when they decide not to interview someone based on that alone, they may be missing on the context because any preconceived notions about why someone changed jobs can only become clear during the interview. Candidates should be judged on their merit and experience; else talent pool may get limited and suitable candidates may be lost.3. If job-hopping is viewed as a lack of loyalty or a lack of staying power, it can be argued that someone who has shown high loyalty might also never have bothered to upskill. If someone is no longer getting any value from staying in a job, are those extra few years or months really improving them as a candidate for you?4. While a job-hopper might be thought of as being disloyal and always wanting to go to the highest bidder, can anyone really say with conviction that the environment necessary to foster growth can be found with a single employer? It is quite possible that changing jobs was necessary to develop diverse and dynamic skills to grow or, at the very least, it was a refusal to settle for being unhappy at work.5. With a gig economy and contract work becoming more common, more than a few months or years may be a very long time in one place. Earlier, if someone changed jobs every five years, he or she was considered a job-hopper. Today, that might make the person the longest-tenured employee at some places.
However, to be practical, candidates should keep in mind that if there is a shortage of talent in the market, job-hoppers will find good opportunities but if the market shifts and there’s more talent than jobs, those who have been more stable will be the first to be called.
Hence, one should seek new employment only if the current position’s growth, learning and salary have started tapering off, the new job opportunity ticks all the right boxes and then justify the job changes as a means towards professional development. This balancing act should go a long way in ensuring that job hopping doesn’t end up being a career killer.