Why Companies HATE Job Hoppers

What's worse on a resume? Job hopping or unexplained employment gaps? Job Hopping the job hopping is a concern for me, especially when the goal is to incite loyalty. They definitely Job Hopping I want somebody that's going to come in. I want somebody that's going to be long term. Yeah, job hopping spooks hiring managers out big time and people online are mad about it. Job hopping came up all the time when I was recruiting. I'd say how about this candidate? They're fully qualified and if the hiring manager saw that that person had moved jobs frequently, often gave me the old Randy Jackson. That's a no for me dog. It's definitely a no for me dog. I even met with a recruiting leader just the other day and I asked him if he saw an issue with the green public Open to work banner on LinkedIn. Totally unprompted, he said no. It's not too big of a deal. But what really turns hiring managers off is job hopping. Which is why I caved in and decided to make this video to illustrate how prevalent of a phenomenon this is and what the heck you can do about it. If you're new here, I'm Madeline Mann. I'm a human resources leader and job search strategist who turns job seekers and job hoppers into job shoppers. You may have seen me in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and more. Subscribe for more videos on how to amp up your career. While it may seem impossible to land a job after I told you how pearl clutching hiring managers find job hopping, know that I'm a bit of a fairy job mother. Especially when it comes to job hopping such as Take for Inst. My client John, who worked for four different companies in four years and after implementing my strategies and coaching landed six job offers. So stick around. There is hope. Let's settle this right up top. What is considered job hopping? It depends on your industry such as law has longer tenures than software, but across industries the Average tenure is 4.1 years according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which for context is has actually been fairly steady the past 30 years. Moving jobs every four years is normal and expected. What is seen as too short of a tenure for full time roles is typically said to be less than two years with under one year. To be happier than an ipa, it's normal to have a few short stints at the beginning of your career, but once you've had a few jobs, the job hop judgments start to set in. There are so many people online telling you you Should Job hop My next piece work advice is that you should strategically job hop. The main reason they promote it is because they found that they were able to get bigger salary increases from moving jobs than from staying put and getting raises. So I started looking at the data, looking at this Yahoo Money graph from the past 10 years. Sometimes moving companies has earned people more, sometimes less. In a 2022 survey from Conference Board, about a third of the 2600 professionals they survey saw salary increases of at least 30% when switching to new positions. But on the other hand, 27% of respondents were actually making less or the same. But on an individual level, some of these increases are really sizable. I did a deep dive into these creators who have gone viral for the sizable salary jumps they've made from job hopping, such as Jules, a data analyst who charts her salary increases from 20,000 to 76,000. Though when I went to her comments, her job changes don't actually fit my definition of job hopping, which I said was moving prior to two year anniversaries, but she actually held each position for two to three years before moving on. We have another example of Sanaya who calls it job hopping as well in her LinkedIn post, when really she stayed at her employers for round two and three years as well and then left her most recent corporate job to start her own business. So for context, hiring managers would see resumes like Juuls or Sand and feel it makes sense. Their career progressions are logical and after a fair amount of time at each company they moved on. So when someone tells you to job hop, ask more questions such as how long were you at each company? What industry and profession are you in? Because I did find people who legitimately job hoping, such as Frank, who job hops and encourages others to do so as well. In the span of six years, I 7x my salary by hopping jobs every one to two years. I started off making around 70k and I ended up making over $500,000. There's also Christian Bordeaux who proudly has job hopped for much of his career. You've moved jobs a good bit. I've had seven jobs in the past four years. My average tenure is eight months, but they've been really great jobs. Job hopping is working for Frank and Christian, but let's take a look at their backgrounds. What do you see as similar? They both work at large companies in technical roles as engineers. This is significant for two reasons. First, it can be easier to job hop between large organizations because they have the infrastructure and narrowness of roles to be able to endure higher turnover such as look at this graph showing how short the typical tenure is at the biggest technology companies. Compare this to a small or mid sized business where each employee may be the only person in their exact role or one of just a few. So every loss of an employee is a big curveball to the employer so they value longer term employees more. And the second point is that these fellows have in demand roles. If you are in a high demand field, hiring managers are likely to be more flexible about your background since beggars can't be choosers and insomniacs can't be snoozers for many of these technical roles, it's a candidate's market. That being said, I have worked with directors of engineering at small companies and they were still ruthless about declining job hoppers from interviews. So again, the context of company size is important. So does job hopping only improve your earning potential if you're in a technical role? Absolutely not. This could totally work for so many other roles. I'm just saying that look at the context of these folks backgrounds. Every person Jules Sinea, Frank Christian came from in demand technology backgrounds. Do salary research and talk to other people in your industry to get a realistic understanding of your earning potential. Put in the comments Are you a job hopper? Say I'm a job hopper or I'm not a job hopper. I am interested to see where you lie given this definition of job hopping. So why do hiring managers hate job hopping more than that awful feeling of having a piece of hair in your mouth? First, let's follow their money. The number of hours it takes to write a job description, review resumes, interview dozens of candidates, and ultimately hire someone costs tens of thousands of dollars and more than anything is a huge distraction for hiring managers because their whole job is isn't hiring. They've got other work to complete. So anything they can do to limit the amount of hiring they need to do is good financially and is also good for their workload. And when that new person is hired, the company may need to pay a headhunter 15 to 25% of that hire's annual salary. That's a lot of cheese. Then once you have that poor soul on the team, you then need to train them. The Allied Workforce Mobility Survey estimates estimates that it takes up to eight months for a newly hired employee to reach peak productivity. Sure, they are contributing before then, but it takes a long time to learn the company, the products, the industry, build relationships, learn the ins and outs of projects for these skilled corporate roles. Again, the hiring manager is like an overworked single mom of five. They don't want to have to go through the process of training you from Valentine's Day to Halloween, only for you to be gone by Christmas. When you are a job hopper, hiring managers know that you fit in one of two buckets. One an opportunistic professional who is looking to climb or two a chronic underperformer who can't seem to hold a job. The scary part is companies can't immediately tell which one you are, a highly in demand dynamo, or someone who is good at interviewing but terrible at working. While they could try to interview you and figure out which one you are, a shortcut is to not even interview you and instead choose a candidate who has fewer red flags. So how should you move companies often enough to get great salary bumps, title increases, and climb more quickly without being a walking red flag to companies? Well, there are several crucial things to remember. First, it's often best to start with your current company when it comes to promoting promotions and salary increases. It's really frustrating to not have a company automatically reward you for your hard work. But it often takes more than doing a good job for employers to realize heck, this person really needs a comp change. I go into more details about this in my video why Lazy Gets Promoted for sure. Watch that to see how you can get that boost at your company that you're at right now. Next, if you're leaving jobs on left, right and center, you need to ask yourself why. Because when I coach people on how to explain things about their past, how the narrative is framed makes all of the difference. Signs that you're job hopping for the wrong reasons is if you find yourself consistently bored or frustrated with your job by the six months mark this is a freeway billboard that you are in the wrong career and picking the wrong companies. You need to seriously evaluate your next job move before making it or else you're going to be in a Groundhog Day situation hating your next job just as much. Also, if you're job hopping to several jobs in a row that have the same title, same responsibilities, your resume could start to look like you are a low performer and have no progression in your career. If you do have a not so flattering job hopping past, there are some things you can do such as you can omit short stint jobs and also clearly delineate when something is a contract role and therefore meant to be short term. You can also explain explain your career transitions on your resume because usually your reason for leaving is much more benign than what's made up in the imagination of the hiring manager. And so for more info on this, be sure to attend my Resume Revamp Masterclass for help on how to still get companies interested in your resume. All hope is not lost though. I guarantee it. Then when you get into the interviews, it's all about reducing the risk that interviewers see when hiring you. Even if they give you the interview, your resume will still be making a first impression every time you interview, and the thought that you are a job hopper may be in the back of their mind. I put together a class on how to go job shopping, not hopping, and an important piece of being a job shopper is putting the interviewer at ease and making them hyper confident that you are the right person to do the job. So much so that details like this from your past will pale in comparison. So I will put that class in the comments and the description below. One thing to note is that many of us have had job hops in our past. We picked the wrong job once or we started one job, but then our former boss contacted us with an opportunity we couldn't refuse and we left. That's okay, job hopping just gets a bit dicey when it's a consistent pattern. It's so good to be hanging out with you. At the end of this video, please click a nice little like on the video and subscribe to the channel for more. You've got this wi fi high five.