Bosses and recruiters often write off frequent job hoppers as unreliable flight risks. Now there is evidence that they could be missing out on hires with a secret superpower: speedy adaptability.
“They possess this hidden skill that we’re overlooking from this bias against them,” said Scott Bentley, an assistant professor of human-resource management at Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations who co-wrote the report. “They’ve learned how to adapt much better than those that don’t have those experiences.”
She believes her early job-hopping now gives her an edge.
“I would be in a role, and then I would see some sort of opportunity or skill set that I wanted to work on,” she said. “I feel like I’m really proactive and can onboard myself superquickly into any company because I’ve done it so many times,” she said.
One of her hacks as a newcomer is to use the product as a new customer would and take notes. “This helps me get a better understanding of how things are working, any opportunities that I can tackle. That’s why she looks for longer term patterns when she comes across a candidate with a résumé with multiple job hops. If they have never stayed in a job for more than a year for more than a decade, she will wonder whether they quit as soon as things get hard or have trouble navigating workplaces.
Then in one-on-one calls with the team, she will ask each the same three questions “with room for the conversation to meander where it needs to go,” she said. Bonnie Dilber, a senior manager of talent acquisition at AI automation company Zapier, said automatically shunning frequent job switchers can mean missing out on a good hire. Otherwise, she said, she will feel out in interviews whether they have been making strategic moves. she said, plenty of others hit the ground running While some job hoppers flounder. “A lot of people have a very sort of nonlinear résumé,” she said. “There has definitely been a shift,” said Michelle Reisdorf, district director at staffing firm Robert Half. “Now employers are really digging into a résumé and trying to truly understand the full story behind what did those moves entail.”
