William Clayton changes jobs so frequently that it has become a running joke between him and his father. Their conversations, he says, go something like this:
Father: “Where are you working these days?”
Son: “Well, Dad, let me think about that a second.”
The exchange gives them both a chuckle. Clayton, 35, is in his seventh job since graduating from college in 1988. His dad recently retired from a job he had held for 20 years.
But this is not his father’s economy. This is the new economy, where most of the rules are different. The days of staying at a company long enough to get that prized gold Rolex are gone, gone, gone.
Welcome to the era of job-hopping.
Workers today are like the proverbial rolling stone. The National Research Bureau recently reported that the average employee changes jobs every three or four years.
Why all of this movement?
Clayton, who hails from Billerica, Mass., said his own job changes were a function of getting laid off, wanting a job closer to home, or finding a position with more challenge in his field, information technology.
Job specialists point out that the current high demand and short supply of technology workers help to create an atmosphere in the market where all workers can easily shop around for new challenges, more money or an escape from a manager they don’t like. Hiring managers, desperate to fill slots in this tight labor market, have had to put aside any negative feelings they had about people who change jobs frequently.
“Employers can’t afford to disdain the absence of loyalty. It’s omnipresent. It has become the standard mind-set,” said Mark Oldman, who is a co-founder of Vault.com, a career development Web site.
The expectations of recent college graduates factor into the equation as well, said Jennifer Floren, president and chief executive of Experience.com, an online job resource for college graduates and young professionals.
Experience.com’s studies show that only 30 percent of college students think their first job will be the right one and only 10 percent believe they will stay more than five years.
Floren said there’s good and bad news to all this job-changing.The good:
“It’s good for the job candidate because there’s a lot of room to be introspective and to be demanding in the type of position that’s going to make them happy. It encourages you to look at your career as something you enjoy doing and to seek out situations that make you feel happy.”The bad:
“With people moving so much, it breaks down the sense of community, especially between employees and employers. When you have lots of turnover, it’s hard to feel a connection to community, to be a part of a greater whole.”
Not to mention what it costs to replace someone. Depending on the level of employee, it can cost between $50,000 and $100,000 to find a replacement, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas, a Chicago outplacement company.
Employers, however, are always looking for people who have a true interest in learning, developing, and moving upward, said Kristin Bowl, a spokeswoman for the Society for Human Resource Management.
The key is finding that kind of job-hopper.
At ePresence, a Westborough, Mass., business that specializes in Web-based solutions to help companies connect with customers and clients, hiring managers try to analyze the motivations of job candidates whose resumes are littered with one job change after another.
“Some people look to go from a large organization to a small one, maybe hoping to have more impact,” said Tony Bellantuoni, the company’s senior vice president of human resources. “Maybe they’re escaping a bad situation. Maybe they’re just looking for a home. We try to assess all these things.”
Sometimes, Bellantuoni said, employees leave their jobs when they fear their company is doing poorly, and they might not get another paycheck.
But this talk about job-hoppers should have an asterisk attached.
All things being equal, many employers would still rather hire a job candidate who has a stable job history, according to the human resource society’s Bowl. Bellantuoni of ePresence concurred.
Just ask Clayton, who has spent the past six months working as an information technology manager at KPMG’s accounting and consulting office in Boston. He said he would rather hire employees who haven’t done a lot of job-jumping.
“It’s purely a less-work thing,” he said. “It takes a lot of time and effort to find people today.”
Brian Hoffman is a managing partner at recruiter Winter, Wyman. He predicts that personnel officers will become more conservative when it comes to job-hoppers once the economy slows down.
“I think hiring managers will look for a more judicious pattern of behavior,” Hoffman said. “The scrutiny will probably come back.”
Of course, that’s just a prediction. But it comes from a veteran who takes the long view. Hoffman has been at his job for 21 years.
