Should You Hire A Serial Job Hopper?

Is there such a thing as a universal “don’t hire!” warning? What behaviours, attitudes and opinions does a candidate need to hold for every and any employer to reject their application?

The difference between a good recruiter and a great recruiter is their ability to make those distinctions: to highlight and isolate key career particulars and attitudinal attributes that consign a candidate's application to the bin, or to the next stage of the application. And time was that they were pretty simple to highlight and stick to - there used to be a series of pretty universal signs a candidate was not going to be a good fit for your company, and it was perhaps not easier to hire, but certainly, clearer to delineate, the good applicant from the bad applicant. 

One of these was how recruiters and HR pro’s across the world handled a Job Hopper - that most mobile of job hunters. 

Job Hoppers were seen as transient; non-committal; low effort; unmotivated and ill-disciplined, due to an assumption (often subjective) that hopping between roles was a sign of their inherent untrustworthiness.

But is this, or has this ever been the case?

Recruitment is an imperfect art. There are compromises along the way, but as long as each party’s values and priorities line up, and as long as the recruiter has done their diligence, everyone exits the partnership happily. 

But have the timeworn pillars of “Good/Bad candidate” crumbled in the digital age? How are attitudes to work changing, and what do employers need to be aware of when it comes to making the right judgment call on their prospective hire, especially considering traditional negative applicant labels like “job hopper”?

Like everything, the double-hit of rapid digitization of job-seeking and employment services due to the pandemic, and a Gen-Z workforce, have ushered in a new era of applicant expectation and career movements. Here’s a summary of how:

Digitization and the Pandemic:

Job seeking is mostly done online, but so now are the other elements of recruitment like company research; gathering references; resume/website promotion; applications, interviews, and onboarding, all via digital channels. Almost every element of the job search, interview, diligence, and onboarding process now can be and is increasingly done online.

Gen Z:
Our youngest working generation has developed a series of workplace expectations world’s apart from any other generation, and their methods and attitudes are bleeding into other demographics too. 

Gen Z’ers are less likely to take a job for life; their value proposition is driven by learning, development and ethical considerations (far more than an income); however, they tie income very tightly to personal achievement; they want their employers to mean something and stand for something and, possibly most critical of all they are more open too, and will actively chase, a portfolio lifestyle. 

What does this mean for clients faced with a job hopper?

Context is everything, and candidate motive is your barometer. 

Context and Motive

Interviewers are faced with an unenviable task of character and value judgment when confronted with a strong candidate who has hopped between roles. Our advice is the following:
First, context: adjust your interview tactics 
A freelance copywriter will have an inherently freer, more flexible, more portfolio approach to work. They may have tens of employers a year, with projects ranging from simple press release writing to website makeovers and national ad campaigns. This does, obviously, not make them bad permanent or fixed hires: they are firmly embedded in the context of freelance work, and good hires by every observable metric. So, interview accordingly - what drives them? What would it take for them to go back in-house? What drives them?

However, a project manager working for a series of large employers, with some tenures lasting a few months or under a year, may signify a clash of ideals, values or expectations within work. It’s your job to not judge, it's your job to find out why. What didn’t work in their previous roles? What clashes, missed targets, bad expectations or mistakes were made? Again, the reasons could be myriad - bullying, the company downsizing, a clash with a colleague, a family emergency - so you need to work tactfully to find out if you, the employer, have what it takes to get the best out of them.

Secondly, motive: adjust your expectations

Your job, as an interviewer, is to find out what drives your candidate.

Whatever the motive for a job hopper making numerous career moves, you are compelled to treat them fairly and objectively. You also need to be communicative and tell your candidate if you have reservations and why you have them. 

Consider the serial entrepreneur. No one will tell a startup paragon they need to settle into a steady career path - their motive is success through self-sufficiency. Does your company need that? If not, that’s fair, but you need to qualify it. 

Job Hoppers are (mostly) not automatons skipping between career paths - they are people, with private motivations and changing contexts that pull them in sometimes bizarre and non-traditional patterns. 

A bad recruiter judges a candidate on these merits alone. A good recruiter tries to understand the journey, focuses on context, and hones in on motive. You never know: you might be passing on your next star hire.