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.
In a new study of 8,700 hedge-fund managers, those who’d switched jobs a lot hit the ground running much faster than other new hires. The researchers say they could tell because they measured just how much money they made.
While other new hires needed an average of five months to get up to speed, the frequent job switchers needed just two months. They also had smaller initial dips in performance as they got started, researchers at Rutgers and Cornell universities found.
“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.”
Tarryn Lambert, who started her current job at a tech company in January, can relate. The 37-year-old lead product manager job-hopped earlier in her career, leaving three full-time positions after less than a year at each. The shortest one was four months.
“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.
She believes her early job-hopping now gives her an edge. “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. 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. “This helps me get a better understanding of how things are working, any opportunities that I can tackle.”
Job hoppers often make the switch for more money. Some people frequently change jobs to rack up new skills and titles, a strategy sometimes referred to as “lily padding.” Others simply hit a stretch of turbulence in their field or industry.
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. 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. Otherwise, she said, she will feel out in interviews whether they have been making strategic moves.
While some job hoppers flounder, she said, plenty of others hit the ground running. “A lot of people have a very sort of nonlinear résumé,” she said.
Both the pandemic and several waves of corporate layoffs since mean that many more people look like job hoppers these days—and that employers are scrutinizing their job history more closely, recruiters say.
“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.”
Russ Catron learned to make his shorter-term stints managing plants a selling point. He managed at five different plants in Mexico for about two years each earlier in his career. Later, when asked about his leadership style in job interviews for executive manufacturing roles, he would bring it up to show how fast he could adjust to a new role.
“I’ve actually used that every time: that my leadership style is adaptable,” said the 56-year-old Catron, who credits the experience with helping him land his first manager role in the U.S. He now runs his own manufacturing consulting firm in Huntsville, Ala.
Write to Ray A. Smith at Ray.Smith@wsj.com
