Fireside Chat #50: Should you hire job hoppers?

At Codurance, our MDs Sandro Mancuso, Mashooq Badar and José Huerta regularly meet for informal chats after work. These discussions, where they share their personal insights, form the basis of our Fireside Chats, which you can find on our YouTube Channel.

The topic of “job hoppers” was brought up as Sandro was contacted on LinkedIn because Codurance had been sharing job roles, positions were available. Sandro stated: “One of our newest roles was for a key position. We wanted the person to have a strategic place and stay with us for a long time. So someone came and said, ‘Hey, I think I'm a perfect candidate for this role’. I looked at this person's profile and I felt that that person would not be suitable. This person had changed jobs multiple times within a very short period of time and within months she could decide to change up this job.”

Sandro shared her story on Twitter and some people came back to say, ‘Hey, you should have given this person a change, a chance, or why would you have this criteria? Some people said you made the right choice. Others said, not sure if you did the right thing.’”

Mash wanted the trio to define a job hopper and proposed: “They've established a pattern where they are staying a short amount of time. That short time could be anything from obviously a few weeks to up to even a couple of years if they're doing it over and over and over again. Two years seems to be kind of almost like a magic number, but I would say it's not just related to that, it's a pattern. That's not like in London, in our industry, the average turnover is 1.5 or 1.4 years or something like that.”

Jose agreed: “I think that's a good definition. I would probably say less than a year. Like if you don't stay for more than a year, then you're kind of hopping.”

The trio discussed creating a triage for deciding on candidates, acquiring new skills in software, the criteria of happiness, organisation culture, market value and pay disparity, self-autonomy, purpose and mastery, as well as providing a place for people to flourish.