What’s with all the job hopping

There was like a pandemic or something…

“Does everyone only work for 2 years at a company then move on?”

I’ve heard this from several hiring leaders in the past month. Not in an accusatory, “everyone is a job hopper” tone.

But in a “seriously wtf is going on nowadays?” tone.

Here’s the deal: loyalty isn’t strong right now. Not from employers. Not from employees.

We’ve had:

👉2 major layoff cycles in under 4 years.

👉A decimated tech sector.

👉A booming job market outside of the tech sector.

👉Inflation that outpaced salary increases.

👉Remote vs onsite back and forth (in some cases, bait and switching.)

👉The after effects of a pandemic that made people question what they even want to do with their lives.

We can’t blame employees for being laid off. We also can’t blame the companies that are scraping to make payroll for not giving increases.

Most people don’t want to be looking for a new job every two years. It’s time consuming and unnerving.

I’m not going as far to say that job-hopping doesn’t matter. But we do need to recognize there’s a difference between someone who had 10 jobs over 20 years vs 2 jobs over 4 years.

Especially the last 4 years.

There’s a lot of valid things to get hung up on when evaluating talent right now. This ain’t one of them.

James Hornick

Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.